Re-electing Corbyn will be disastrous for Labour, warns Smith

Labour faces the “choice of a generation” in its forthcoming leadership election, Owen Smith has said, warning members that re-electing Jeremy Corbyn would see the party consigned to irrelevance and allow the Conservatives to rule without obstacle for decades.
Those casting votes in the contest had a “crushing duty to think hard” about what they were doing, the challenger warned, arguing that Corbyn had failed to provide credible opposition to Theresa May’s government.
“It’s a disastrous government we’ve got right now, and where are we in offering really robust, serious and credible opposition to that?” he said. “I’ll tell you where we are – nowhere. And Jeremy has to be held accountable for that as the leader of the party.”
Smith said Corbyn, the favourite to win in the vote of party members, registered supporters and trade union affiliates, was not on course to prevent the Conservatives potentially ruling for 20 more years. “You cannot mistake the mass rallies that Jeremy is gathering for the mass movement that we need to gather, the mass movement of 12mn or 13mn people, voting Labour, in order to stop this happening,” he added.
For the speech in London, Smith’s team produced a mocked-up Conservative manifesto for 2020, using ideas from the party and associated think-tanks to predict that if May’s government was not properly challenged it would roll back the state, cut taxes and benefits, sell off social housing, and introduce hundreds of grammar schools.
Featuring the Tory logo – prompting one Conservative MP to ask if permission had been sought – the mock manifesto was, Smith insisted, a credible picture of a Conservative programme “if they were wholly unfettered, both by coalition, or indeed by a substantive and credible opposition in the Labour party”.
Smith said: “It’s an ugly vision of what Britain could become, without a Labour opposition. And I’m not prepared to stand by and see another 18 years of the Tories, as we did in the 1980s. Britain would be unrecognisable at the end of that.”
The election, which will see the victor announced at the start of the Labour conference on September 24, was “a watershed”, Smith said.
“There is an enormous choice, a choice of a generation, a watershed for Labour – whether we move forward to becoming once more ... looked at by the country as a credible alternative to the Tories, or whether we recede into irrelevance, being thought of as not able to take back the reins of power from the Tories,” he said.
Asked how he would respond if he lost the contest, Smith said he would continue to make the same arguments, predicting that the party risked new divisions if Corbyn won again.