The first Scottish event in the Labour Leadership battle has taken place with the official launch of the Scottish Labour for Jeremy Campaign.
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Rival candidates in Labour’s leadership contest Angela Eagle and Owen Smith are reported to be close to making a deal to take on current leader Jeremy Corbyn so as not to split the moderate vote.
But the 46-year-old has been a member of the Labour party since he was 16, and was special advisor to Paul Murphy, the Labour government minister in charge of Wales and then Northern Ireland, between 2002 and 2005.
More than 100,000 people have joined Labour since the European Union referendum result, with many hoping to cast votes in the upcoming leadership election.
Asked about the race by the BBC’s Andrew Marr, he said: “I think one of us standing would be better, is the honest answer”.
Corbyn was elected leader in September 2015 after an election prompted by the resignation of Ed Miliband when Labour lost the May 2015 general election.
Both Angela Eagle and Owen Smith are putting themselves forward as anti-Jeremy Corbyn candidates and as candidates of unity who think they’re not as far left as Corbyn but are not Blairites either.
Voting on the next Labour leader has been a source of great controversy.
Jeremy Corbyn is a good and honourable man, but he is not a leader.
“We have a wider gap between the haves and have nots in this country than any of us have known in our lifetimes and it is for the Labour Party, our party, to fight to reduce that gap”.
But Labour’s National Executive Committee has said Mr Corbyn can remain on the ballot paper without securing any fresh nominations.
“It’s really very hard and it’s distressing because for all of us who have devoted our lives to the Labour Party and been members a long time the sort of abuse that is being directed at ordinary Labour Party members, whatever the idea was behind a kinder gentler politics it is not what we have seen”. “All other leadership candidates will require nominations from 20 percent of the PLP and EPLP”.
The leadership contest was triggered on Monday when lawmaker Angela Eagle challenged Mr Corbyn. The Labour party has to be a party about investment not cuts, we have to be a party that understands that austerity is utterly self-defeating. “She’s easy to hold to account, but we have to have a functioning party to do it, which is why I’m doing this”.
Smith said Britain and the Labour party were in crisis.
Only a strong, united and competent Labour Party can stop that happening and start leading us back to power.
He added: “When I saw the letter, I was appalled that such an undemocratic intervention made at a time when we should have been celebrating what was one of the finest days in the history of our local party”.
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However, they have a two-day window from July 18 to apply for a vote as a registered supporter, but the cost has risen from £3 previously to £25.
