“Whether people support Jeremy or Owen, they are all saying the same thing – that Labour can now win in Southport and that they want to get involved in helping us fight for every vote”.
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The lights failed at the U.K. Labour leadership contest’s second debate, plunging party leader Jeremy Corbyn and challenger Owen Smith into darkness as they clashed over nuclear weapons and Britain’s strategy in negotiations to leave the European Union.
But Mr Corbyn, who was cheered several times during the event, told him: “Since the election last summer our party has grown enormously, 300,000 new members have joined because they want to see this country governed and run in a different way”.
A Labour constituency meeting in Jeremy Coryn’s home turf of Islington last night descended into a debate about anti-Semitism in the party, according to those present.
Mr Smith also claimed that he, not Mr Corbyn, could take Labour to being a government-in-waiting, ready to take power at the next election.
Shadow health secretary Diane Abbott said she was not calling for Mr McNicol to go, or expecting him to, but stressed: “The General Secretary serves at the will and pleasure of the NEC and that’s a matter for them, not a matter for MPs”.
“We regret that Tom Watson also forced through the decision yesterday at Labour’s NEC meeting to challenge the court judgement to restore the right to vote in the leadership election”.
In the 1980s, the Labour Party expelled hundreds of members of groups who followed the doctrines of the Bolshevik leader Leon Trotsky.
Mr Corbyn has previously described Mr Miliband as a “great friend”.
The party’s more centrist members consider, Corbyn, a 67-year-old left-winger, unelectable. Whoever emerges as their new leader will want to act quickly to make inroads into this Conservative poll lead and address concerns about the party’s future.
Watson told the Guardian that new members were using the party “as a vehicle for revolutionary socialism” and “peddling baseless conspiracy theories”. “I will likely re-purpose this domain for Bristol based Labourers information”.
But Mr Smith replied: “I just say, Jeremy, we’ve been here before, and we’ve been here in my lifetime”.
“People say he has only had nine months, but with the Tory government we have, I don’t think we can wait another nine minutes”.
He wrote to Mr Corbyn – whose campaign had dismissed the claim as “conspiracy theories” – in a curt letter backing up his remark alongside a dossier of evidence.
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He added: “I’m in a different position to the rest of the Parliamentary Labour Party”.
