Labour MPs argue that Corbyn is so unpopular that he is unlikely to lead the opposition party to victory in the next general election.
Advertisement
In a high-profile intervention in the ongoing election for the next Labour leader, London mayor Sadiq Khan on Sunday appealed to party members to vote in favour of Owen Smith, who is challenging the current leader and favourite, Jeremy Corbyn.
The mayor says that while Corbyn is “principled”, he has “failed to win the trust and respect of the British people”.
Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn has suggested the United Kingdom should not automatically come to the aid of North Atlantic Treaty Organisation allies facing aggression.
Documents seen by The Telegraph reveal that nearly 5,850 people have been reported to the party’s executive in total, more than 3,000 of them for allegations of abuse, with the rest accused of anti-Semitic behaviour and of supporting other political parties – banned under Labour’s rules.
Instead, they are allowed to preach down to the Labour party membership, the public, the Labour MPs and Constituency Labour Parties who support Corbyn, Momentum, and Jeremy Corbyn himself – as if they McTernan and Murphy were some sort of election-winning dream team.
Even so, many rank-and-file Labour members remain supportive of Mr Corbyn, and bookmakers make him the clear favorite to retain the leadership.
Those calls mostly quieted following the election of Khan, the city’s first Muslim mayor, in May 2016, but Corbyn again faced a mass mutiny within his party in June after Britain voted to leave the EU.
He said both he and Mr Corbyn agreed on many issues but disagreed on whether the party was on a “trajectory to win power” under Mr Corbyn’s leadership.
Corbyn has continuously denied that he failed to strongly campaign for the United Kingdom to remain in the EU.
Mr Smith questioned Mr Corbyn’s leadership style – suggesting he should have pressed former PM David Cameron harder on Iain Duncan Smith’s surprise resignation from the cabinet – and PM Theresa May on the implications of the European Union referendum. A third of Labour voters said they didn’t know where the party stood on the referendum just a week before polling day.
“He showed that a vision of hope and optimism can win, if it’s backed up with a credible plan to deliver real meaningful change for people’s lives”, the Guardian quoted Smith as saying.
“And you can’t just blame a “hostile media” and let Jeremy and his team off the hook”.
Advertisement
“We also say to those people who are relatively well off, ‘are you happy walking past the homeless and the starving on the streets of our country when there is no need for that, when we could do things very differently?'”. Results are announced on September 24.
