LABOUR MPs must ‘work with’ whoever is elected leader later this week, Harriet Harman has said pleading with Labour’s right wing not to split the party if Corbyn wins the election.
The party’s acting leader said Labour had to rebuild with an effective opposition leader and also someone who was ‘electable’ as prime minister. Leftwinger Corbyn remains the frontrunner ahead of Saturday’s poll.
Harman said she was ‘absolutely confident’ the result would be legally sound, with Labour having purged 4,000 people out of the ballot. Harman told the BBC’s Andrew Marr Show that Labour had conducted ‘due diligence’ on the thousands of non-party members who have paid £3 to register to vote and blocked people deemed to be infiltrators from rival parties or organisations from taking part.
Whoever is elected on Saturday would be a ‘valid’ winner, she said, with more than 500,000 people having taken part in the contest. Harman said she remained ‘scrupulously neutral’ in the leadership contest. Several leading frontbenchers have said they will not serve under Corbyn’s leadership while others have said the veteran MP will take Labour in the wrong direction on the economy, Europe and in foreign affairs.
Harman said: ‘Obviously we want a Labour leader who is going to be an effective leader of the opposition and a prime minister.’ Leadership contender Cooper said she was ‘fighting for every vote’, suggesting that up to 50% of Labour members, registered supporters and affiliated supporters had yet to make up their mind.
Insisting that the choice they made ‘would affect the next ten years’, she told Dermot Murnaghan on Sky News that she offered a ‘clear alternative’ to the Tories but also to Corbyn who she said would ‘return Labour to the 1970s and 1980s’. The Tories were saying that a Corbyn victory would leave them in government for a decade.
Yesterday, Tory leaders had changed their tune saying that a Corbyn victory would mean that they would not get the House of Commons support for UK bombing Syria. Their cry has become ‘Anybody but Corbyn!’
