Owen Smith pledges more power for Labour Party members

Jeremy Corbyn has thanked Labour MPs for taking on new roles in “very hard circumstances” during the chaotic aftermath of the party’s mass shadow cabinet walk-out.

Usdaw, whose members include retail and distribution workers, has backed Owen Smith, arguing that he stands a greater chance of leading Labour to power.

At the Birmingham hustings for the leadership elections last week, Corbyn said that when Russian Federation threatens to attack or invade any North Atlantic Treaty Organisation country, he hoped to avoid that by diplomatic means, and that he “doesn’t want to go to war”.

Khan, who became the first Muslim mayor of a major western capital earlier this year, urged the party membership to ditch Corbyn and throw its weight behind Smith in a strongly-worded interview with The Observer.

He added the leadership contest was a “fight for the future” of the party and for the “prospects of working people in this country”.

But he has failed to win over numerous party’s MPs, 80 percent of whom backed a recent vote of no-confidence in Corbyn.

“I don’t think the SNP will be able to take any comfort from a Jeremy Corbyn victory”.

Dugdale, the party’s most highly elected female politician, wrote in the Daily Record on Monday that Smith could win a general election and reunite the party.

“And the answer to that question is, for me, very clearly Owen Smith, because he represents a mixture of radical policies and politics combined with a credible plan of getting back into government”.

But, for anyone who has paid close attention to what Khan has said about the current Labour leader over the past year or so, the former’s intervention really should not come as a surprise.

“Not some misty-eyed, romantic notion of a revolution where we are going to overthrow capitalism and return to a socialist nirvana… but a cold-eyed, practical socialist revolution where we build a better Britain”, he said last month.

Party members will receive their ballots by post as well as an email with an online ballot code – giving them a choice as to how they vote – but supporters will receive only an online ballot. “We won London under Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership”, she said.

“I know what happens when a party repeatedly refuses to listen to the message that the electorate is saying; when repeatedly it seems out of touch”. And I agree with my compatriot and colleague-historian Rutger Bregman in The Guardian ( 19th of August) that Corbyn symbolizes the return of a “underdog socialism” that fails to give people hope or self-confidence, especially those in countries bordering Russian Federation.

But she said she and her deputy were “absolutely united and on the front foot” on promoting the party’s manifesto for tax increases to boost education.

In an excoriating attack, she said Mr Corbyn had “picked on” the two Black and Minority Ethnic (BAME) MPs and had made it “impossible” for them to do their jobs properly.

Dugdale said if she had lost the support of her MSPs in the way Corbyn had with Labour MPs, she would have resigned.