Veteran left-winger Jeremy Corbyn was convincingly elected leader of the UK’s opposition Labour Party on Saturday, after a contest that revealed deep divisions within the party’s ranks.
Corbyn, a socialist who ran on an anti-austerity platform, claimed victory in the first round of voting — taking 59.5% of the votes cast by more than half a million eligible Labour Party members and supporters.
The contest was triggered by the resignation of former Labour leader Ed Miliband in May, following the Conservative Party’s surprise outright win in the general election.
“The fightback now of our party gathers speed and gathers pace,” Corbyn said, in a televised speech after the results were announced.
He said one of his first acts as the party’s new leader would be to go to one of a number of events being staged in London on Saturday to show support for migrants and refugees. He hailed what he said was a great shift in attitude in Europe in the past few weeks toward refugees fleeing conflict.
“Going to war creates a legacy of bitterness and problems,” he said. “Let us be a force for change in the world, a force for humanity in the world, a force for peace in the world, and a force that recognizes we cannot go on like this, with grotesque levels of global inequality, grotesque threats to our environment all around the world, without the rich and powerful governments stepping up to the plate to make sure our world becomes safer and better — and those people don’t end up in poverty, in refugee camps, wasting their lives away.”
Lawmaker Tom Watson was elected as the Labour Party’s deputy leader.
Corbyn, 66, started out as a rank outsider — in fact, he barely made it into the leadership contest at all.
Only the last-minute support of a handful of members of parliament who wanted to help broaden the debate by including the left-winger got him onto the ballot in June, alongside Andy Burnham, Yvette Cooper and Liz Kendall.
But it wasn’t long before Corbyn’s campaign took off. In the weeks since, a succession of Labour grandees have stepped forward to warn of dire consequences if supporters chose Corbyn as their new leader and sent the party to the left.
In a Guardian newspaper opinion piece, former Prime Minister Tony Blair suggested the Labour Party was “in danger more mortal today than at any point in the over 100 years of its existence,” and that with Corbyn in charge it risked “rout, possibly annihilation” at the next election.
Nonetheless, tens of thousands more people registered as Labour Party supporters in order to vote in the leadership contest — and Corbyn remained the bookmakers’ favorite to win.