Labour MPs urge Smith to attack Corbyn over IRA

The speech is part of his campaign to remain as Labour leader after being challenged by Owen Smith for the leadership.

Speaking at last night’s Labour leadership hustings with Owen Smith, Corbyn said he would seek to use diplomacy, rather than use armed force.

He said: ‘You would obviously try to avoid that happening in the first place, you would build up a good dialogue with Russian Federation to ask them and support them in respecting borders’.

Fellow Labour MP and Corbyn critic Wes Streeting said the leader’s view would make him unfit to be PM in the public’s eyes.

On the prospect of Republican nominee Donald Trump becoming U.S. president, Mr Smith said: “I’d be prepared to work with whoever the president was of America, that would be in the interests of the British people and we want a serious Labour government that would always act in the interests of the British people”.

But Mr Corbyn would not give a concrete assurance that he would act to do so if he was in Downing Street.

Smith took just 53 nominations compared to 285 who backed the Labour leader, who took support from CLPs who nominated all three other candidates in 2015 – Andy Burnham, Yvette Cooper and Liz Kendall.

“And the choice for this generation is: Are we happy to sit back where we are or do we think we need to be a Labour government once more?”

Underdog Mr Smith is expected to lose heavily to Mr Corbyn in the contest which ends next month, but received a significant boost to his campaign yesterday after it was revealed that 1,000 Labour councillors from across the United Kingdom had signed a letter supporting him. “I don’t wish to go to war, what I want to do is achieve a world where there is no need to go to war”. That would be the job of Britain in the event of a fellow North Atlantic Treaty Organisation member being invaded, obviously.

But Smith went on: “The suggestion he [Corbyn] is the only socialist in our party is an insult to many of us who are socialists”.

Lord West of Spithead, former head of the Royal Navy and a former Labour security minister, called Mr Corbyn’s statement “extraordinary”.

The MP for Pontypridd was also jeered after he said “that 170 socialist Labour MPs don’t feel that Jeremy is offering leadership”.

“We are not “Red Tories” or anything else that we are branded on Twitter”.

“It wasn’t good enough for the leader to say one thing to me, only for his political secretary to phone a day later and say: “He may have said that, but I know what he really thinks”“.