Labour leadership challenger pledges push for second EU referendum

Labour leadership hopeful Angela Eagle has insisted she is the best candidate to beat Jeremy Corbyn, despite a challenge by Owen Smith.

He indicated he would also want to raise capital gains tax from 20%.

“If you are a union general secretary supporting a unilateralist politician, you do so in the knowledge that thousands of your members may lose their jobs”.

“We want unity in the party because that is the only way we are going to succeed and get our policies across”.

“If I were Len McCluskey I’d be more anxious about his own re-election campaign rather than sabre-rattling at Labour MPs”.

“I will stand in this election and I will do the decent thing and fight Jeremy Corbyn on the issues”, Labour lawmaker Owen Smith told the BBC.

By positioning themselves in that way, they think they could potentially be acceptable to both wings of the party.

Asked how the pair would decide who commands the most support and take on Mr Corbyn, he suggested the candidate with the largest number of nominations could be the challenger.

Mr Smith was due to warn that he believes the Labour Party is heading for a “disastrous split”.

“It seems to me that a 25-pound bar is quite high and not really reasonable”, he said, and the fact that people who joined the party in the last six months are ineligible to vote is “simply not very fair”.

He added: “When I saw the letter, I was appalled that such an undemocratic intervention made at a time when we should have been celebrating what was one of the finest days in the history of our local party”.

Earlier this week, veteran Labour MP and shadow Welsh secretary Paul Flynn said it would be “very difficult” for Mr Corbyn to “find a way out”.

“We trusted people, rightly, to take the decision”.

Angela Eagle has already announced her bid to be leader last week.

We haven’t a moment to lose, because the bunch of hardliners the new Prime Minister has put in government will try to use Brexit as an excuse for slashing workers’ rights and forcing through even more cuts. “We’ve got to keep it comradely”, Ms Eagle told the Marr show.

The new Prime Minister was called on by the SNP’s Westminster leader to pause the vote until MPs know the full cost of the UK’s nuclear deterrent.

A spokesman added: “No abuse of any kind by Labour Party members or supporters is tolerated”.

Foster, who stood as a parliamentary candidate for Camborne and Redruth a year ago, argued that Corbyn should not be allowed to “self-nominate and use support external to the parliamentary party to maintain his leadership”.

The leftist, who unexpectedly won the leadership previous year after spending three decades on the back benches, can count on the support of left-wing activists and the trade unions.