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

LABOUR veteran Margaret Beckett yesterday admitted she had been a ‘moron’ for nominating Jeremy Corbyn. The ex-Foreign Secretary was one of a number of MPs who backed Mr Corbyn to ensure a wider leadership debate. Yesterday she told BBC Radio 4’s World at One: ‘At no point did I intend to vote for Jeremy myself – nice as he is – nor advise anyone else to do it.’ Asked if she was a moron for nominating the Left-winger, she replied: ‘Yes, I am one of them.’

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 with large majorities, said a shift to the Left after the party’s crushing defeat would be to treat voters as if they were ‘stupid’.

Speaking to the centre-Left Progress thinktank, 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, paving the way for 18 years of Conservative rule.

‘After the 1979 election … the Labour Party was put out of power by Margaret Thatcher and the Labour Party persuaded itself that the reason why the country had voted for Margaret Thatcher was because they wanted a really Left-wing Labour Party,’ Mr Blair 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 f rom 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. The suggestion Mr Corbyn – originally seen as the rank outsider – could win was greeted with dismay among leading figures on the centre and Right of the party. Shadow education secretary Tristram Hunt warned Labour could be reduced to a ‘pressure group’.

Mary Creagh, former leadership candidate, wrote in the New Statesman the party is in danger of becoming ‘the political equivalent of Millwall FC’, whose fans boast ‘no one likes us, we don’t care’.

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 ‘spineless’ and a ‘disgrace’. His Facebook page has more than 1,000 mainly negative comments, accusing him of ‘ destroying the vulnerable’ and ‘betraying’ supporters.