Labour donor John Mills warns Jeremy Corbyn leadership win could split party

Contender for leader of Britain’s Labour party Jeremy Corbyn outside his campaign headquarters in north London, Wednesday July 22, 2015.

Mr Blair suggested people whose heart said they should support Mr Corbyn’s politics should “get a transplant”, while Lord Mandelson said Labour’s existence as an “effective electoral force” was at stake in the election.

When Liz Kendall, Andy Burnham and Yvette Cooper all said they would not, Corbyn replied: “If Europe becomes a totally brutal organization which treats member states in the way it has treated Greece, ” then it would lose the support of many people”.

She is adamant that as leader she would support giving the city major new powers. “This briefing is nonsense because in a preference vote it doesn’t matter how many candidates there are”, a spokesman said.

“At the moment the Labour Party is being posed with this false choice – choose between your head and your heart, choose between your values, stick to your principles, be unelectable, or, alternatively, ditch all your principles in order to be elected”. 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.

These contrast with what some Labour supporters now see as the compromises of the Blair years which they say took the party too far away from its socialist roots.

“I think it would be disastrous for the party, it would be disastrous for the country, we’ll be out of power for a generation”, she said.

A poll of Labour councillors conducted by Anglia Ruskin University suggests Cooper would win out in a tight run-off with Andy Burnham. The idiocy of the Blairites lies in the fact that every time they launch an attack on Jeremy Corbyn, they raise his public profile, meaning more people have heard of him and might have a look into what he actually stands for.

Liz Kendall agreed that Labour needed to champion reform of the House of Lords, but added that she was also a “passionate advocate” of the alternative vote.

Pressed whether he would take a shadow cabinet position under Mr Corbyn, Mr Burnham said: “I would”.

Kendall said that she was concerned the boycott was an initiative to “delegitimise Israel” and insisted the priority must be to battle rising anti-Semitism in the UK.

Labour is not yet in the place where we can say with confidence: “The only way is up”.

“If I didn’t think Jeremy could win, I wouldn’t be backing him”.

He said having Corbyn as leader would be ‘like going back to Star Trek or something.

“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”. Giving his response to Mr Blair’s criticism before a speech on his economic policies in central London this morning, Mr Corbyn simply said:”I think Tony Blair’s big problem is we’re still waiting for the Chilcot Report to come out”.

Predicting what happens with the second preferences is very tricky, particularly as we have little knowledge of how the new 50,000 members will go and where their loyalties are.

Farage asked the Labour leadership candidates if they would consider voting no in a EU referendum.