Blair warns UK’s Labour not to lurch left in leadership race

“The SNP and UKIP have clouded our sense of direction because they seem to point away from the centre”, he said. “I don’t want to be a party of protest and I wouldn’t be able to stop myself from making that case”.

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

It led to calls for Ms Kendall to drop out of the race and throw her support behind one of the other mainstream candidates to ensure one of them secures enough votes to beat Mr Corbyn, the veteran left-winger.

Cooper said Nigel and other Eurosceptics wanted to make the UK a “darker, narrower, more impoverished place”.

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”.

Corbyn did not waste time in replying to Blair’s attack, saying: “I think Tony Blair’s big problem is we’re still waiting for the Chilcot Report to come out”.

Professor Mark Wickham-Jones of Bristol University told AFP Corbyn was appealing “because there is a substantial segment of the party that’s no longer interested in any kind of strategy that revolves around deficit management, austerity”.

Meanwhile Mr Blair’s former adviser in Downing Street John McTernan, who was also a leading figure in Jim Murphy’s ill-fated election campaign in Scotland, described MPs who nominated Mr Corbyn to widen the debate as “morons”.

During his own speech to economists and unionists, Corbyn dismissed Blair’s comments. There is actually much empirical evidence published in some of the most respected Political Science Journals that supports this interpretation of the narrowing class divide in British Politics, for instance here, here, and here.

It is an improbable story for a man who last month admitted it had taken some persuading for him to become the token “hard left” candidate after Ed Miliband, the party’s former leader, lost the general election on May 7th. Liz Kendall was such an appalling non-entity that even a politics nerd like me knew nothing about her before the leadership election.

“If Jeremy Corbyn was elected leader I wouldn’t take a position in his cabinet”.

Ms Kendall is reported to be under pressure to quit the contest to allow the moderate vote to rally behind one of her two centrist rivals – Andy Burnham and Yvette Cooper.

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

Among Labour supporters, his net score is +24 (those who agree minus those who disagree), Cooper is on +12, Corbyn -8 and Kendall -12.

Who are the candidates?

Tony Blair has issued a stark warning to Labour not to repeat the mistakes of the 1980s which consigned the party to 18 years in opposition. “I did not intend to vote for Jeremy myself – nice as he is – nor advise anyone else to do it”, she said. We voted for an amendment which would have blocked the bill, would have stopped it in its tracks, would have ditched the whole thing, but that got completely lost.

Of course all this confusion amongst the Labour party over which way to go politically can only be to the satisfaction of David Cameron, George Osborne and the parliamentary Conservative party.