‘If Corbyn wins, expect years of Tory rule’: Leadership rival Yvette Cooper

Electing frontrunner socialist candidate Jeremy Corbyn to the Labour Party leadership could guarantee years of Conservative rule, consigning Labour to the failed policies of the past, according to campaign rival Yvette Cooper.

“Inevitably there is frustration and anger at the prospect of five more years of Tory government. It is really important we channel that anger into defeating the Tories,” Cooper told the Independent newspaper on Wednesday.

She warned that an activist-driven Labour rooted in campaigning social movements would take the party “back to the 1980s.”

“It is no use just shouting from the sidelines. It is no use being angry about the world. We have got to change the world,” she warned.

Cooper warned that with Corbyn as leader “today’s four- and five-year-olds could have to spend their entire childhood under a Tory government if we are not determined and ready to win again.”

Labour’s biggest challenge was to beat the Tories “on their own terms” and to “win back a lot of votes from people who voted Tory at the last election.”

Cooper said she understood the Labour Party had been rattled by the outcome of the general election in May: “Of course there is a lot of soul searching across the party.

“The important thing is that we emerge stronger from this and pull together as a united party and we really get serious about winning the next election. Otherwise we are going to let people down.”

Cooper’s views are not shared by everyone.

Writing in the Belfast Telegraph on Wednesday, Northern Irish writer and activist Eamonn McCann referred to Corbyn’s rivals – including Cooper – as the “three charisma-bypass candidates.”

He said Corbyn’s ideas were being portrayed in the mainstream media as “sheer madness, a death wish, suicide note, irresponsible, adolescent, Disneyland politics, hopelessly deluded.”

Yet, McCann argued, “most of the ‘unpopular’ policies which critics say would make a Corbyn-led party unelectable are, in fact, rather popular with the mass of the people.”

“We can assume nothing about the Labour contest, or what Corbyn would do if elected. But he has thrown a scare across the unaccountable elite,” McCann said.

60 percent of those asked in a recent YouGov poll support his plan to renationalize the railways, while 56 percent support his plan for a 75 percent top rate of tax on incomes of over £1 million.

Two thirds of British people (64 percent) agree with the veteran anti-nuclear campaigner that there should be a global ban on the weapons, according to a Comres study.

Corbyn has long called for the hundreds of billions spent on Britain’s Trident nuclear submarines to be channeled elsewhere.