The new left-wing leader of Britain’s opposition Labour Party was to promise in a speech yesterday to make decisions by nationwide consultation — an approach critics say could cause confusion about party policy and deepen internal divisions.
Labour Party Leader Jeremy Corbyn, a veteran backbench member of parliament, was elected earlier this month on a pledge to involve the party’s general membership more closely in policy and eschew the central policy discipline of recent decades.
He won over nearly 60 percent of members and supporters, but less than Labour’s more than 230 lawmakers.
While moderates in the party have said they would respect his mandate, there are several policy areas where he is at odds with many fellow lawmakers, including over the renewal of Britain’s Trident nuclear deterrent and membership in NATO.
“I am not imposing leadership lines,” Corbyn was to say in a speech at Labour’s annual conference in the southern English city of Brighton, according to extracts released in advance.
“I do not believe anyone has a monopoly on wisdom; we all have ideas and a vision of how things can be better. I want open debate, I will listen to everyone, I firmly believe leadership is listening.”
Some Labour lawmakers fear Corbyn’s left-wing politics could make him unelectable in 2020 elections. While many have kept silent on the subject, others are hoping the new leader comes unstuck as he struggles to overcome divisions in the party.
On Sunday, the Labour Party said it would be holding a review of how it makes policy to make it “more inclusive, open and democratic.”
“Bottom up, not top down. In every community and workplace, not just at Westminster. Real debate, not message discipline,” Corbyn was to say, hailing what he has described as a “new politics.”
However, some in the party worry this would leave voters confused about what Labour stands for before local and regional elections in May next year, Corbyn’s first major electoral test.
Under pressure from many in the pro-European party, Corbyn has already backtracked over Britain’s membership of the EU.
Having been ambiguous about whether he would campaign for Britain to remain in the bloc at a referendum due by the end of 2017, he has now said Labour would back staying.
“If people don not know what the position of the Labour Party is, then we are not going to look like a party of government and people won’t know what they are voting for,” British Member of Parliament Chuka Umunna, Labour’s former business spokesman, said on the sidelines of the conference.
“It is not sustainable for different people in our leadership to be saying different things,” he said.
Former Nicaraguan president Violeta Chamorro, who brought peace to Nicaragua after years of war and was the first woman elected president in the Americas, died on Saturday at the age of 95, her family said. Chamorro, who ruled the poor Central American country from 1990 to 1997, “died in peace, surrounded by the affection and love of her children,” said a statement issued by her four children. As president, Chamorro ended a civil war that had raged for much of the 1980s as US-backed rebels known as the “Contras” fought the leftist Sandinista government. That conflict made Nicaragua one of
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