March of the Labour Remainers
Starmer, Cooper and Thornberry set out pitches for leadership – but can they woo Corbynistas?
LABOUR heavyweights yesterday set out their stalls for taking a shot at the leadership of their demoralised party.
Emily Thornberry and Yvette Copper tried to distance themselves from Jeremy Corbyn – while Sir Kier Starmer insisted there should not be a return to the policies of Tony Blair’s New Labour.
More Labour MPs, including Wigan MP Lisa Nandy have signalled they are considering a bid. Key Corbyn ally Rebecca Long-Bailey is seen as the choice of the current leadership.
Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell has said the next leader must be a woman who does not represent a London seat, because the party lost so many votes in the North and the Midlands. This would rule out Miss Thornberry, who represents Islington South and Finsbury.
However, she said Mr Corbyn’s replacement should be chosen on the basis of their ‘political nous and strategic vision’, rather than where they come from or their views on Brexit.
She was highly critical of the Labour leadership for backing Boris Johnson’s call for an election on Brexit, saying it had been like ‘crackers voting for Christmas’.
‘I wrote to the leader’s office warning it would be “an act of catastrophic political folly” to vote for the election, and explained exactly why we should not go along with it,’ she said.
She also argued in the Guardian yesterday that she has already ‘pummelled’ Mr Johnson across the Dispatch Box when he was foreign secretary, and knows how to exploit his failings.
Though she was critical of Labour under Mr Blair, she praised it for having ‘political insight and absolute clarity of purpose’.
Miss Thornberry is embroiled in a row with defeated Labour MP Caroline Flint who asserted that the Shadow Foreign Secretary had told a colleague: ‘I’m glad my constituents aren’t as stupid as yours.’ The Remain campaigner and former barrister has threatened to take Miss Flint to court unless she withdraws the allegation.
Sir Keir denied that he was too middle class to become Labour leader as he urged the party not to abandon its radicalism.
The party’s Brexit spokesman, who is widely expected to stand in the leadership race, warned that Labour must not ‘oversteer’ away from the Left-wing policies of the past four years.
He said Mr Corbyn had been right to make Labour an ‘anti-austerity’ party and – in a clear attempt to distance himself from the legacy of Tony Blair – he said the party could not afford to go back to ‘some bygone age’.
Sir Keir is seen as being from a more centrist position than Mr Corbyn, and his strong support for a second referendum may make him unpopular in parts of the North. The former director of public prosecutions is also a millionaire, which may put him at odds with grassroots supporters.
But yesterday he insisted: ‘ My dad worked in a factory, he was a toolmaker, and my mum was a nurse, and she contracted a very rare disease early in her life that meant she was constantly in need of NHS care,’ he told Radio 4’s Today programme. ‘ So, actually, my background isn’t what people think it is.’
He said it would be a mistake to respond to last week’s catastrophic election defeat by abandoning Mr Corbyn’s radicalism.
‘What Jeremy Corbyn brought to the Labour Party in 2015 was a change in emphasis that was really important – a radicalism that matters,’ he said. ‘We need to build on that rather than simply say “Let’s now oversteer and go back to some bygone age”.’
Former Cabinet minister Yvette Cooper said she was also considering a leadership bid and suggested the party needed to move away from the politics of both Mr Corbyn and Mr Blair.
‘We cannot just become a party that is concentrated in cities with our support increasingly concentrated in diverse young fast-moving areas while older voters think we aren’t listening to them,’ she told the Today programme.
‘This is where both the Jeremy Corbyn and Tony Blair challenge comes in, because both the Left and the Right of our party are seen as internationalist, not patriotic.’
Stephen Glover – Page 21