JEREMY CORBYN must “broaden his appeal” and devise a new economic policy if he becomes Labour leader or the party will never win a general election, warns the woman tipped to be his deputy.
In an interview with The Sunday Times, Caroline Flint said Corbyn would need to pay more attention to the views of the public, rather than his hordes of hard-left supporters, or Labour would be doomed to electoral defeat.
“Anybody who wants to be leader cannot be immune from what the public are saying,” she said. “If Jeremy wins, he’s going to have an enormous responsibility and duty to make sure he broadens his appeal or we will not be in a position to win the next election. Four out of five votes we need to win are Tory votes.
“If he wants to win a general election, he’s going to have to develop an economic platform capable of convincing people. One of our problems at this last election was that the Tories had managed to convince the public that we weren’t credible on the economy.”
Flint insisted she is tough enough to rein in Corbyn’s far-left tendencies and vowed to use her “mandate” to speak out if she disagreed with him. “I’ve never been accused of not being tough enough and telling it how it is. I see my job as making sure the leader is not in a bubble, not surrounded just by people who tell them what they want to hear,” she said. “What I will be focusing on all the time is how we win an election. Our party is not a pressure group, it exists to win elections.”
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Flint criticised Corbyn for sharing a stage with Tony Mulhearn, a Liverpool Militant leader who was ejected from Labour in 1986. “I wouldn’t share a platform with Tony Mulhearn,” she said.
Flint suggested Corbyn had been able to thrive because the other leadership candidates — Andy Burnham, Yvette Cooper and Liz Kendall — were members of the Westminster political class that had alienated the public. “People want authenticity in politics. Part of Jeremy’s appeal is that he is comfortable in his own skin. He says what he thinks and people respond to that. The public can smell insincerity a mile away.”
Flint, who grew up with an alcoholic lone-parent mother who died at 45, emphasised her own life story. “We’ve not all worked for MPs, we’ve not all been special advisers, we’ve not all gone to Oxford or Cambridge,” she said. Widely seen as the main challenger to Tom Watson in the deputy leadership race, Flint said she had received a boost because Corbyn’s expected victory meant many activists would like a woman in the top team.
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She warned that “a shadow hangs over” the election result after Trotskyites, Greens and Tories exploited new rules that allow anyone who pays £3 to become a registered Labour supporter and vote. A group of former ministers and Labour donors are plotting legal action to challenge a Corbyn victory if he fails to win the support of full party members as well as the new arrivals.
Corbyn has recruited Alan Simpson, the former left-wing MP, to oversee a “complete rethink” of energy policy, reducing the UK’s reliance on fossil fuels and ushering in a German-style green technology revolution.
Simpson said Corbyn’s energy policy was “going to scare the living daylights out of the fossil fuel companies”, which received £26bn in subsidies last year. He said it would lead to lower bills and more choice, with Corbyn keen to turn communities into “virtual power stations” producing their own cheaper electricity and even selling it back to the national grid.
Simpson is against nationalising energy firms but wants to “break up the racket”, and thinks subsidies for fossil fuels should be redirected to sustainable energy, including solar, wind power and methane gas. He is opposed to fracking and in favour of phasing out nuclear power stations.
Blair hits out at Labour’s ‘suicidal rush’
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Tony Blair has made his second intervention in the Labour leadership race, attacking the “Alice in Wonderland world” in which Jeremy Corbyn looks set to win.
The former prime minister, right, likens “Corbynmania” to a “suicidal rush towards a cliff edge” in The Observer today .
“There is a politics of parallel reality going on, in which reason is an irritation, evidence a distraction, emotional impact is king and the only thing that counts is feeling good about it all,” Blair writes.
He accuses Corbyn of advocating “a revolution, but within a hermetically sealed bubble — not the Westminster one they despise, but one just as remote from actual reality”.
Blair admits he does not “properly understand” why Corbyn is surging ahead in the contest: “It is about to transform a political institution we spent our whole lives defending. But it is part of something much bigger in politics..”