Sign up to FREE email alerts from Liverpool Echo - Weekly Politics Subscribe Thank you for subscribing We have more newsletters Show me See our privacy notice Invalid Email

Birkenhead MP Frank Field has called for Labour to elect a new leader before the next election in 2020 to replace Jeremy Corbyn.

Mr Corbyn, who won a landslide vote for the leadership of Labour last summer, is not a “prime minister-in-waiting” according to the Mersey MP.

Mr Field was one of those who nominated Jeremy Corbyn when he first stood for the leadership, saying at the time it was to help stimulate debate within the party during the leadership race.

Writing in the New Statesman, Mr Field says: “At some stage, the Parliamentary Labour Party will need to elect an alternative prime minister .”

Mr Field praises his party’s leader for being “genuine” and that he “doesn’t look part of the metropolitan elite that has dominated the leadership of the three main parties”.

But he says the issue is “the way he puts these utopian goals as if they were an immediate programme for government” and added that Labour voters are “turned off in abundance” by the Labour leader’s views on issues such as immigration and defence.

The Birkenehad MP’s comments come just a few days after his own constituency party narrowly voted to scrap the nuclear deterrent Trident.

Wirral councillor and long time member of Birkenhead Labour party, Moira McLaughlin, said around 30 from a Labour membership of more than 700 in the constituency attended the meeting last Friday to discuss a motion put forward from Rock Ferry ward proposing Trident nuclear weapons be scrapped.

It ended with 14 voting to call for the weapons to be scrapped and 12 in favour of keeping them, and five abstaining.

Cllr McLaughlin said: “In the end it came down to two people and there were were quite a few abstentions, it was not the most lively debate I’ve ever heard.

“I think on another day, with a different group of people, we would have had a different result.

“But it’s not binding on Frank. The result will go to the NEC (National Executive Committee).”

Following the meeting Mr Field said the issue is one the party “should debate regularly”.

The MP also said Labour had never had a leadership “that rings truer with a huge majority of the electorate” on issues such as tackling low pay the “gross rewards of people at the very top”.

But he added: “At the same time, on the key things on which the election will be decided, on controlling our borders, or welfare reform and on economic competence we seem to be marching in the opposite direction to where not only our voters are but also many of the voters we have to win over.”