Corbyn at war with senior Labour MPs over plan to ally with Greens in 2020

SENIOR POLITICAL CORRESPONDENT JEREMY CORBYN has opened the door to an election pact with the Green Party in a plan that provoked a new outcry from his senior MPs.

The Labour leader has refused to rule out supporting Caroline Lucas, the Greens’ Left-wing, anti-war MP, in her constituency of Brighton Pavilion.

Mr Corbyn is said to be considering not fielding a Labour candidate against Ms Lucas at the next general election in 2020 as part of a wider plan to unite the Left.

The idea provoked a furious response from moderate Labour MPs who are already at war with their new Left-wing leader. They said the move was another attempt to change the make-up of the party by “smuggling in” people from outside fringe groups.

Mr Corbyn and his aides are drawing up plans for a new year reshuffle, first reported in earlier this month, in which he is expected to sack his opponents who backed the bombing of terrorist targets in Syria.

In an interview with the socialist magazine , Mr Corbyn was asked directly whether rumours of a non-aggression pact with Ms Lucas in Brighton were accurate.

“That’s tomorrow’s problem, that’s not today’s,” he said. “We’ve got to build the ideas, then develop the movement, and then we’ll see.”

Labour politicians in the Brighton area expressed dismay at the prospect of being ordered to give up their battle with people they view as political rivals.

Peter Kyle, the Labour MP for Hove, said voters would be repelled by the idea of his party forging a pact with the Greens just seven months after fighting them in local and national elections.

“In Brighton and Hove the Greens are incredibly divisive,” he said.

“In May, I took back control of Hove from the Tories and the Labour group took control of the council from the Greens – pushing them from first to third. We can attract voters from the Right and unify the Left. But we cannot do it by fiddling the electoral system and limiting who voters can vote for.

“The public will take a very dim view that we are fixing the system.”

One senior Labour MP, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said there were fears that Mr Corbyn could take a similar approach to the Respect party, which George Galloway, the former MP, represented after he left the Labour party.

The senior Labour MP said Mr Corbyn and John McDonnell, the shadow chancellor, had a wider agenda to unite the entire Left-wing of politics.

“This isn’t a business deal. It’s a way to smuggle people and policies into the Labour Party from the Greens and elsewhere,” he said.

“It’s part of Corbyn and McDonnell’s philosophy of ‘no enemies to the Left’. Try telling that to Labour members who have been fighting these people for years. But now we’ve effectively opened the door to them.”