Jeremy Corbyn has predicted his now assumed election as Labour leader today will prompt a coming-together of the party, as he prepares to change politics by offering a collegiate and less confrontational leadership style.
With the polls finally closed, and with his supporters confident he has gone from being a 200-1 outsider to an astonishing winner, Mr Corbyn plans to follow an acceptance speech by addressing tens of thousands of people due to march in London on Saturday in support of refugees.
He is determined to foster what he regards as a new social movement that has emerged this summer inside the wider labour movement.
Mr Corbyn is to offer shadow cabinet posts to all wings of the party. Speaking to ITV News, he said: “MPs are important but they are not the entirety of the Labour party.
“We have a big job to do in exposing the government’s austerity programme and what it’s doing to the poorest and most vulnerable in our society: their Bill on welfare reform and their Bill on trade-union issues, and the way they are actually systematically slicing up public services in Britain through massive cuts and local government grants.”
But Mr Corbyn faced a wave of criticism from senior party figures, some of whom warned his supporters were sinister and represented little more than a Trotskyist 1980s throwback.
Electoral failure
Liz Kendall, the Blairite candidate, predicted a Corbyn leadership would end in electoral failure and repeated her pledge that she would not serve on his frontbench, since their political differences on the economy and foreign policy were too fundamental.
She said: “When the public are crying out for politicians to say what they mean, and mean what they say, I cannot serve on Labour’s frontbench if Jeremy Corbyn is leader.”
A wider group of senior shadow cabinet members has now collectively agreed to refuse to serve, saying they will accept the democratic result and give Mr Corbyn the time and space to set out his agenda.
They say if a group of seven or so MPs were in the shadow cabinet while deeply opposed to his politics, it would be a recipe for instability and division; it would be better instead to have an honest disagreement outside the shadow cabinet.
They are stressing they will accept his democratic mandate and its legitimacy, but that does not mean they are required to say they believe Mr Corbyn will make a credible prime minister.
The first solid indications of the party mood came yesterday with the selection of Mr Corbyn's supporter Sadiq Khan, a left-leaning lawmaker, as Labour's candidate for next year's election of the mayor of London.
Khan (45), the first Muslim to attend cabinet, was Labour's justice spokesman during the last parliament and will compete against a Conservative party candidate yet to be announced in the May 2016 election to succeed Boris Johnson.
Khan won 59 per cent of the vote, far more than the runner-up, former minister Tessa Jowell, with 41 per cent.
Guardian/Reuters