Former British Prime Minister and Labour leader Tony Blair warned his party against electing socialist Jeremy Corbyn as party leader, after the pro-Palestinian MP emerged as the frontrunner in the leadership race in a new poll.
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Leadership hopeful Liz Kendall said she would fight boycotts “with every fibre in my body” while Yvette Cooper said the Labour party should be “very clear” about opposition to the boycott describing it as “counter-productive”. Labour was built as the party of the industrial working class, then transformed by Blair and his “New Labour” colleagues to embrace private investment, personal wealth and the financial sector.
Ms Kendall is reported to be under pressure to quit the contest to allow the moderate vote to rally behind one of her two centrist rivals – Andy Burnham and Yvette Cooper.
The party leadership will be decided on September 12. The first step in this process is for the next Labour leader to spend the first 18 months in the role reminding the public that equality done the Labour way lifts people up; without dragging anyone else down. “There is a perfectly sound case for saying we should have tightened policy before the crash [but] there is no case whatever for effectively accepting that labour caused it”.
Blair is clearly desperate to prevent the emergence of a leader of the Party who publicly called for a debt conference to write off Greek debt, like the 1953 London Debt Conference, which wrote off Germany’s, and who supports establishing Glass-Steagall in Britain, as heavily debated in the House of Lords particularly in 2013. This led Nicola Sturgeon to comment that indeed David Cameron is not lord of all he surveys and will not if the SNP have anything to do with it always get his way.
Blair also said Labour, which was nearly wiped out in Scotland by the Scottish Nationalist Party (SNP) and lost many votes in the north of England to the anti-EU UK Independence Party (UKIP), needed to tackle the issue of nationalism head on.
“Charlie made a great contribution to the last Labour government and I would have thought he would have learned that one of the reasons we achieved so much was because there was a record number of women around the top table”.
Stressing the city’s need for skills, she said: “Liverpool has a fantastic and growing digital economy – how are we going to give kids those IT and technology skills in the future?”
“Candidates should now move into the areas of policy – that’s why Jeremy is doing so well, they know where he stands”, he said.
Ms Cooper today joined Mr Burnham in criticising Labour’s approach to the Welfare Bill as a “complete mess”. “The whole thing has been badly handled”, she said. “We can do both”, she said. “I think his politics are wrong for Labour and for the country”.
Corbyn said, “Tony should look at what he is saying”.
“You can’t change people’s lives unless you win those elections and Liverpool needs a Labour Government nationally to make even more improvements there”.
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“Sadly, the other candidates I don’t think have responded in the way that I hoped they would do in taking the argument to him essentially about whether he is or is not a deficit denier”, he told BBC Radio 4’s The World at One.
