Blair: Corbyn would put Labour in the wilderness

He warns party as hard-Left MP takes poll lead

LABOUR risks being out of power for another 15 years if it elects Jeremy Corbyn as leader, Tony Blair warned.

The former prime minister’s intervention yesterday came as a poll put the hardline Left-winger on course to a shock victory – rattling the party elite.

The survey by YouGov found Mr Corbyn was well ahead on first preference votes – meaning he was likely to beat Andy Burnham in the final round by 53 per cent to 47 per cent.

Mr Blair said the party would lose repeatedly as it did in the Eighties if it reverted to being simply a ‘platform for protest’ against cuts.

‘We’ve got a history – let’s learn from it,’ he said. ‘My advice to the Labour Party is we do not need to go through four election defeats.’

Mr Corbyn used a speech yesterday to unveil his hard-Left vision of Britain, with wealthier people and businesses being hit with higher tax bills to pay for government spending.

Attacking Mr Corbyn’s ‘old-fashioned Leftist’ views, Mr Blair said: ‘When people say, “My heart says I should be with that politics”, well get a transplant – because that’s just daft.’ Mr Corbyn’s surge raised fears of an SDP-style split, with Labour members on the Right leaving the party if he wins. The poll increased pressure on Yvette Cooper and Liz Kendall to pull out of the leadership race to make it harder for the veteran socialist to win. But both claimed they were the only candidate who could stop the Left-winger.

The former PM, who won three elections decisively, said a shift to the Left after the party’s defeat would treat voters as if they were ‘stupid’. Speaking to the centre-Left Progress think-tank, Mr Blair derided Mr Corbyn as the ‘Tory preference’.

He compared the position facing Labour to the Eighties when the party swung to the Left under Michael Foot, leading to 18 years of Tory rule.

‘After the 1979 election … the Labour Party was put out of power by Margaret Thatcher and Labour persuaded itself that the reason why the country voted for Margaret Thatcher was because they wanted a really Left-wing Labour Party,’ he said. ‘This is what I call the theory the electorate is stupid, that somehow they haven’t noticed that Margaret Thatcher was somewhat to the Right of Jim Callaghan.’

Attacking Ed Miliband, he said Labour had ‘rediscovered how to lose’, adding: ‘You win from the centre, you win when you support business as well as unions. You don’t win from a traditional Leftist position.’ But research by YouGov for The Times found Mr Corbyn was the first preference for 43 per cent of party supporters – way ahead of bookies’ favourite Andy Burnham on 26 per cent. Shadow home secretary Miss Cooper was on 20 per cent and Miss Kendall 11 per cent. The study forecast that if the two women were eliminated, and second preferences redistributed, Mr Corbyn would beat Mr Burnham by six points in the final round. Shadow education secretary Tristram Hunt warned Labour could be reduced to a ‘pressure group’ if Mr Corbyn won the leadership contest.

Mr Corbyn said of Mr Blair: ‘I would have thought he could manage something more serious than those very silly remarks.’ He said austerity was a ‘political choice not an economic necessity’ and promised a ‘publicly-led expansion and reconstruction of the economy’. ÷LABOUR supporters called Andy Burnham’s abstaining on welfare cuts a ‘disgrace’. His Facebook page has more than 1,000 mainly negative comments, accusing him of ‘destroying the vulnerable’.

IT’S all too tempting to view Labour’s increasingly self-destructive search for a new leader as just a comically bizarre piece of political pantomime.

And the idea that Jeremy Corbyn – the bearded old class-warrior and Morning Star columnist – is the man to lead the party out of the wilderness is perhaps the oddest joke of all.

Yet the polls have the North London socialist comfortably ahead of his three rivals, confirming that Labour is still in denial over its election humiliation. Ed Miliband, driven by his union paymasters, stood on an aggressively antiausterity ticket and was soundly thrashed. So the party’s answer is to lurch even further left, contemptuously suggesting the electorate simply got it wrong.

Some party grandees – including acting leader Harriet Harman – are warning that unless they wake up from their selfdeluded trance, Labour could be out of power for a generation. But the Left is in the ascendant and in no mood to listen.

Ironically, Tony Blair’s attack on Mr Corbyn yesterday is likely to make him even more popular among the grassroots, who have come to loathe their triple- election winning former leader with a passion. David Cameron and George Osborne are doubtless enjoying this slow motion car crash – but is it good for the country?

Labour controls many large councils and a violent swing to the left could affect millions of lives. Remember the havoc caused by the militants in Liverpool in the 1980s? And much as the Mail applauds the Tories’ outstanding record on reviving and rebalancing the economy, all governments must be held to account.

A functioning democracy requires a strong opposition – not a fractious, irrelevant rabble.