Old leftie Corbyn chosen to lead UK’s Labour Party
THE British Labour Party elected its most socialist leader in at least 30 years, signalling a further drift away from the free-market policies that brought the party electoral success under Tony Blair.
Jeremy Corbyn won 59.5% of the vote to succeed Ed Miliband as opposition leader, with his nearest rival, Andy Burnham, getting 19%.
Tom Watson, who took on media mogul Rupert Murdoch over phone hacking, was elected deputy leader in a separate ballot.
A fierce critic of Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne’s spending cuts, Corbyn won over Labour supporters with his appeal to scrap the UK’s nuclear weapons, nationalise the railways and energy companies, and fund infrastructure projects with money printed by the Bank of England.
“Our party has changed. We’ve grown enormously, because of the hopes of so many ordinary people for a different Britain, a better Britain, a more equal Britain,” Corbyn, 66, said in a speech in central London after the result. “The fightback now of our party gathers speed and gathers pace.”
Prime Minister David Cameron, who stands to gain electorally from splits in the opposition, has accused Corbyn of being in denial about the need to cut the deficit and ridiculed the leadership election. Labour had “completely vacated the intellectual playing field”, he said in a speech on Friday.
Corbyn, who has spent his 32 years in parliament on the fringes of the Labour Party, went from the 200-to-1 outsider to runaway favourite, amid a surge of people signing up to support the party following its election defeat.
He nonetheless has the support of less than 15% of Labour MPs, and having voted against his party hundreds of times, he may struggle to unite them.
Corbyn’s victory is part of a shift seen across Europe in recent years, from Syriza in Greece to Spain’s Podemos, as voters deserted centre-left parties after the financial crisis forced governments to slash public-sector jobs and benefits. — Bloomberg