Jeremy Corbyn and Owen Smith are making their final pitch to win votes in the Labour leadership contest.
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Voting ends today at 12pm, with the result set to be announced at a conference in Liverpool this Saturday.
Mr Corbyn has proposed that ordinary party members should be allowed to have a say in who serves in the shadow cabinet – but deputy leader Tom Watson believes MPs should be responsible for electing their peers.
Corbyn and his backers reject these proposals as attempts to undermine his authority and want Labour members to have more say in the running of the party including being able to vote on the shadow cabinet.
They passed a no-confidence vote in Corbyn, but he refused to resign, sparking a leadership challenge. But now majority have quit their posts, saying Mr Corbyn is not a leader and won’t win a general election. “A choice that will not just determine the future of our party, but the future of the millions of people in Britain who need Labour in power”, he wrote.
Mr Corbyn is also keen to see party members have a greater role in the NEC and on forming policy.
He said. “I think it’s going to be really tough to get the 59.5 per cent that we got last time around because of the numbers that have been prevented from voting”.
“Anything else would be destructive self-indulgence”.
David Miliband has claimed the Labour party has not been further from power since the 1930s as part of a stinging attack on Jeremy Corbyn.
Mr Miliband contrasted the heady days of New Labour’s election triumphs to the party’s current ability to lurch from crisis to crisis, with this weekend’s autumn conference nearly cancelled due to a row over security.
“That is why I’m saying, whoever is elected, it will be their job – we have always been a broad church in the Labour Party”.
The problem with the strategy of trying to deliberately create the self-fulfilling prophecy that Jeremy Corbyn is “unelectable” is that if the prophecy comes true, there are an terrible lot of people in the Labour Party who will blame the saboteurs, not the leadership.
Mr Miliband is particularly critical of Mr Corbyn’s “egregious” stance on foreign policy.
The former foreign secretary, who quit United Kingdom politics after feuding with his brother Ed over the Labour leadership, condemned Jeremy Corbyn’s “half-hearted” European Union referendum campaign.
Graham Sharpe, of bookmaker William Hill, said: “All of the serious money staked from a £60,000 bet downwards has been for a convincing Corbyn victory”.
They included not only full party members, but also trade union affiliates and registered supporters who paid £25 for the right to vote. Unite behind the leader and actually try to win, or carry on trying to undermine the party and put themselves up as the people to blame when their self-fulfilling prophecies come true.
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Mr Corbyn insists he wants to build bridges with the parliamentary party once he is re-established in post – and some of his critics have indicated they would be willing to work with him.
