Owen Smith: Jeremy Corbyn won 'decisive' victory

Labour leadership challenger Owen Smith has congratulated his opponent Jeremy Corbyn, saying he won a decisive victory.
Mr Corbyn has won his bid to retain the Labour leadership, defeating the Pontypridd MP.

The Labour leader received 61.8% of the vote - a larger margin than 12 months ago.

First Minister Carwyn Jones said Labour now had to work hard to offer the UK the opposition it had been "denied".
The turnout was 77.6% of the party's 640,500 eligible voters.

Mr Smith said: "There is no doubt that the Labour Party has changed under his [Corbyn's] leadership, he has mobilised huge numbers of people over the last 12 months, many of whom are here at conference in Liverpool, and he deserves the credit for that, and for winning this contest so decisively.

"I have no time for talk of a split in the Labour movement - it's Labour or nothing for me... although today's result shows that our movement remains divided, it now falls primarily to Jeremy Corbyn, as Labour leader, to heal those divisions and to unite our movement."

Welsh Labour leader Mr Jones offered his congratulations to Mr Corbyn along with his "commiserations" to Mr Smith, who he said fought a "good campaign".

But he added: "This has not been a happy period for the Labour Party, the country has been denied the functional and forensic opposition they have a right to expect in Westminster, and we must work hard now to put that right."

Mike Hedges, Swansea East AM and a supporter of Mr Corbyn, told BBC Radio Wales the result tells the parliamentary labour party "loudly and clearly that Jeremy Corbyn has the overwhelming support of the membership", which he said "should stop another leadership campaign next year or the year after".

Shadow Welsh Secretary Paul Flynn said Labour's "gap year from reality is over", adding: "We must bury futile infighting and unite to defend the NHS, the welfare services and universal education that we created."

'The onus is on Jeremy'
Caerphilly MP and Corbyn critic Wayne David, who had resigned from the Labour frontbench before the challenge by Mr Smith, did not think the result had changed anything.

"The onus is on Jeremy now. He has a fresh mandate. He has to make real his words," he said.

He added if Mr Corbyn had a desire to make a team he would be "more than happy to work for him" but added "that does not necessarily mean I would go on the front bench".

Former shadow Welsh Secretary Nia Griffith had also stepped away from the Labour senior team in the wake of the referendum.

Ms Griffith said: "I think the really important thing now is to try to pull together and get people from all parts of the party to take part and really participate in making the Labour party work properly".

On Friday, Ms Griffith said she would be willing serve in a shadow cabinet under Mr Corbyn, three months after quitting the shadow cabinet.

Cardiff councillor Darren Williams, a Corbyn supporting member of the ruling National Executive Committee, said "the whole party in Wales has to get behind" Mr Corbyn "and make sure that we turn outward and take the fight to the Tories".
Recently Labour made changes that would give the Welsh party more control of its own affairs.

Mr Williams welcomed the move but said: "I hope there won't be an attempt by Welsh Labour to isolate itself from the positive things that Jeremy represents at the British level."

He said there had been some "indication that some people in Welsh Labour see devolution within the party as a way of distancing Welsh Labour from the British party and avoiding the party from adopting democratic changes in its rule book".

Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn speaks after being announced as the winner of the party's leadership contest
The result comes after a tumultuous summer for Labour following the Brexit vote and months of tension between the leadership and the party's MPs.

Following criticism of Mr Corbyn's alleged "lacklustre" campaigning in the referendum, many Labour shadow cabinet members resigned.

Mr Corbyn then lost a confidence vote and in July Mr Smith challenged the Labour leader for the top job.
The campaign also led to legal disputes over the rules and who was entitled to vote.

Mr Corbyn, who held rallies to large crowds, promised to tackle inequality, neglect and prejudice but Mr Smith claimed his rival was unelectable.

A spokesperson for the Welsh Conservatives said: "Jeremy Corbyn's re-election is merely another chapter in the protracted saga of the Labour party's decline."

Plaid Cymru leader Leanne Wood said: "The chaos and infighting engulfing the Labour Party as well as the proposed boundary changes mean that the party is unlikely to win a Westminster election for at least a decade, possibly even longer ...

As opposed to Red Jerry, who is both "indescribable" and unelectable.
The perfect antidote to the working two party system.

He looks like someone who would sell you sausages in some remote quaint village far from the beaten track. Or maybe he looks like an undertaker who has buried too many corpses.

I might like to have a look at his policy/ platform before I made any decision

Unforgiven wrote on Sep 25^th, 2016 at 9:51am:


67% of a few hundred thousand radicals is one thing. A majority of votes in a population of 60 million is another thing altogether.

Probably most sensible, middle of the road Labour people wish he could. Certainly about 80% of Labour MPs don't want Corbyn.
He has captured the underclass who have infiltrated Labour, but as the French Revolution showed us, the mob are fickle.

Poverty in Wales
Poverty in Wales isn't about drought, war or starvation - as it can be in developing countries - but it's every bit as real.

Read this page in Welsh

Almost one in four people in Wales lives in poverty which means they get less than 60% of the average wage. That is about 700,000 of our fellow citizens. That level of relative poverty has remained unchanged for decade.

David Lloyd George came from Wales too. He was the man who introduced the age pension in the UK.

Old age pensions have been won by labour-movement campaigning, or granted by conservative politicians trying to pre-empt rising labour movements.

The idea of a universal old-age pension, payable to all elderly people as of right, was first raised in the French Revolution of 1789–99, although the policy was never carried through.

The first comprehensive old-age pension was legislated in Germany, in 1889, by a conservative leader, Otto von Bismarck, who wanted to stall the rise of the then-illegal German socialist movement.

Britain’s trade unions started campaigning for old-age pensions in the 1890s, and won their first victory with a very meagre means-tested pension introduced in 1908 by a Liberal government.

bogarde73 wrote on Sep 25^th, 2016 at 12:06pm:


He was compelled by union pressure. The Germans had pensions 20 years earlier.

Confess Bogarde73! You are a secret Welshman.

http://www.workersliberty.org/node/3935

Quote:

Probably most sensible, middle of the road Labour people wish he could. Certainly about 80% of Labour MPs don't want Corbyn.
He has captured the underclass who have infiltrated Labour, but as the French Revolution showed us, the mob are fickle.

Owen Smith, "The Stooge Candidate" (because nobody in PLP had the backbone to take on Corbyn themselves), has had the veil lifted from his eyes and realises what many of us in the Labour Party have been saying for years. The Conservative government and the ConDem coalition before them, are destroying the NHS with their programmes of cuts, closures and piecemeal privatisation.The Blair government started the process with PFI and the Conservatives have accelerated this smashing of a National Institution which they have despised since 1948.
Strangely, Smith (who was never Shadow Health Minister; another of Smith's distortions of truth), must have been aware of this breakup of the NHS for sometime, as he was once working for an organisation, closely associated with the vandalism, but has chosen to remain silent until now. This may be due of course to his leadership challenge, as he now sees the possibility of some advantage in condemning NHS privatisation and taking a sideswipe at Hunt and the conservatives. We may be excused for detecting a degree of hypocrisy in Smith's sudden conversion