East Lancashire Labour MPs backing Andy Burnham for party leadership

Mr Hunt is a supporter of Liz Kendall, seen as the most Blairite of the candidates – and the one who is lagging in the race, according to pollsters and bookies.

Burnham said: “I was the representative that day from a very out-of-touch government who had not been listening for years”.

“The staff of the Labour party both in London and Newcastle have worked incredibly hard to try and deal with the massive number of applications”.

“I invite the Parliamentary Labour Party to understand that there is a huge democratic movement in this country which is getting great resonance, with older people coming back to Labour and younger people who were previously turned off by yah-boo-sucks abusive politics coming into it for the first time”.

Mr Burnham said he was “not giving anybody any advice as to how they should cast their second vote”.

Brand – who insists he does not want to be involved in “leadership elections or voting type stuff anymore” – says Corbyn is an unfair target of criticism “simply because he is in public talking out on behalf of ordinary people”.

“We can’t carry on as we are and the good news is that this leadership election could bring real change to our party”, he said.

He has gone from 100/1 outside to odds-on favourite to land the Labour leadership.

Speaking to BBC’s Newsnight, Corbyn said: “Obviously there has to be a party of all the talents and of course, we can work together, and that is an easy thing to do”.

He added: “Labour would have to change direction and do more than just produce a new leader”.

Former prime minister Gordon Brown yesterday made a high-profile intervention in the Labour leadership contest to warn of the risks of becoming a “party of protest”.

Yet others feared the rise of such a left wing candidate was an indictment of the state of the Labour party in the wake of its crushing General Election defeat.

(JNS.org) The U.K.’s Jewish Chronicle newspaper has sounded the alarm over the impending election of Member of Parliament Jeremy Corbyn as the next head of the Labour Party and British opposition leader, asking Corbyn to prove he is not “an enemy of Britain’s Jewish community”.

I’ve spent my life opposing racism.

“He was not my cheerleader then and I am not his cheerleader now, serious people do not reason in these terms”.

But the rise of fellow socialist Jeremy Corbyn in the race to become Labour leader has prompted Mr Nellist to hint that TUSC could throw its weight behind Mr Corbyn and Labour – but only if certain conditions are met.

The special programme, which will come live from The Sage in Gateshead on Thursday, 3 September, is your chance to put the contenders on the spot about what they stand for.