Jeremy CorbynBritish opposition leader Jeremy Corbyn passed a key electoral test on Friday when his Labour party won its first parliamentary seat since he took the helm in September.
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In an interview with The Huffington Post UK, the former Tory leader and Foreign Secretary said that Mr Corbyn featured little in Labour’s campaign in the Oldham West and Royton by-election. But to increase our share of the vote since the general election is a vote of confidence in our party.
Mr McMahon, the leader of Oldham Council, said: ” I am delighted to have been elected tonight.
But it has not changed the underlying dynamic of conflict between Corbyn and most of the party membership on one side, and the overwhelming majority of Labour MPs on the other.
Jeremy Corbyn needed a boost after the week he has had and the Oldham West and Royton by-election has delivered it.
UKIP leader Nigel Farage branded the result “perverse” and said “serious questions need to be asked”.
“I have spoken to our organisers and they have got no knowledge of that”. We’ve driven the Tories back on tax credits, on police cuts, on their whole austerity agenda and narrative.
“And I hope they can reflect on the result in Oldham last night and the tough week Labour have had and realise we’ve all got to swing together”. There, polls show his “new politics” is being challenged by the anti-immigration populism of the U.K. Independence Party in a district his party held with a 34 percentage-point majority in May.
At the same time he issued a warning to Mr Corbyn’s critics in the Labour ranks that some of them had gone “too far” in their public denunciations of the leader.
Many have also drawn comparisons with the nearby seat of Heywood and Middleton, another historic Labour stronghold where in late 2014 Ukip shocked onlookers by coming within 620 votes of defeating the centre-left.
The result was “very, very good” for Corbyn, said Watson, who urged dissident MPs to rally around the Labour leader.
Pressed on whether MPs should potentially face deselection for failing to tow the party line, Mr Wrack, a long-time ally of Mr Corbyn whose union recently re-affiliated to Labour, replied: “It depends upon the circumstances and it depends upon the issue”. It was a decisive victory with our share of the vote going up. Labour won 30.4 percent of the vote in May and the Conservatives 36.9 percent. We must redouble our efforts to achieve a fairer Britain.
“I think people responded to that at the ballot box”.
“There is nothing wrong with people making a democratic decision not to support UKIP”, he said”.
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“Clearly the Labour party has fought a very local campaign, a campaign in which Jeremy Corbyn wasn’t in the picture very much and the Labour candidate was”, he said.
