Opposition leader cannot win general election and should resign for sake of party, says renowned physicist and Labour voter

Stephen Hawking has said Jeremy Corbyn should resign as Labour leader, adding that although he believes in many of his policies, he cannot win a general election.

“I regard Corbyn as a disaster,” the renowned physicist told the Times. “His heart is in the right place and many of his policies are sound, but he has allowed himself to be portrayed as a leftwing extremist.”

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Hawking said he would still vote Labour but did not believe the party would win at the next general election. “I think he should step down for the sake of the party,” he said.

Hawking, a long-time Labour supporter, publicly endorsed his local Cambridge Labour candidate, Daniel Zeichner, at the 2015 election. Zeichner, who went on to defeat the Lib Dems’ Julian Huppert, has said: “I think he fully appreciates the huge investment that the last Labour government made in science and you can see that in a lot of the buildings and laboratories around Cambridge.”

Hawking, who was diagnosed with motor neurone disease aged 21, is a staunch defender of the NHS, having previously said the health service “must be preserved from commercial interests who want to privatise it”.

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During the interview, the professor also expressed some fears that the human disposition towards aggression was becoming more of an existential threat with each technological advancement.

“Since civilisation began, aggression has been useful in as much as it has definite survival advantages,” he said. “It is hardwired into our genes by Darwinian evolution. Now, however, technology has advanced at such a pace that this aggression may destroy us all by nuclear or biological war. We need to control this inherited instinct by our logic and reason.

“We need to be quicker to identify such threats and act before they get out of control. This might mean some form of world government. But that might become a tyranny. All this may sound a bit doom-laden but I am an optimist. I think the human race will rise to meet these challenges.”