Party leadership contender urges caution over vote and says incumbent has failed to provide credible opposition to Tories

Labour faces the “choice of a generation” in its forthcoming leadership election, Owen Smith has said, warning members that re-electing Jeremy Corbyn would see the party consigned to irrelevance and allow the Conservatives to rule without obstacle for decades.

Those casting votes in the contest had a “crushing duty to think hard” about what they were doing, the challenger warned, arguing that Corbyn had failed to provide credible opposition to Theresa May’s government.

Jeremy Corbyn pledges £30bn to ‘restore pride and prosperity’ to south-east England Read more

“It’s a disastrous government we’ve got right now, and where are we in offering really robust, serious and credible opposition to that?” he said. “I’ll tell you where we are – nowhere. And Jeremy has to be held accountable for that as the leader of the party.”

Smith said Corbyn, the favourite to win in the vote of party members, registered supporters and trade union affiliates, was not on course to prevent the Conservatives potentially ruling for 20 more years. “You cannot mistake the mass rallies that Jeremy is gathering for the mass movement that we need to gather, the mass movement of 12 million or 13 million people, voting Labour, in order to stop this happening,” he added.

For the speech in London, Smith’s team produced a mocked-up Conservative manifesto for 2020, using ideas from the party and associated thinktanks to predict that if May’s government was not properly challenged it would roll back the state, cut taxes and benefits, sell off social housing, and introduce hundreds of grammar schools.

Featuring the Tory logo – prompting one Conservative MP to ask if permission had been sought – the mock manifesto was, Smith insisted, a credible picture of a Conservative programme “if they were wholly unfettered, both by coalition, or indeed by a substantive and credible opposition in the Labour party”.

James Cleverly (@JamesCleverly) Did @Conservatives give him permission to use our logo on that document? I'd be rather surprised if we did. @peterwalker99 @GdnPolitics

Smith said: “It’s an ugly vision of what Britain could become, without a Labour opposition. And I’m not prepared to stand by and see another 18 years of the Tories, as we did in the 1980s. Britain would be unrecognisable at the end of that.”

Smith’s team later released calculations saying this theoretical Conservative government would cut another 800,000 more public sector workers by 2020, and cut £16bn more from local government budgets over the period.

The Labour election, which will see the victor announced at the start of the Labour conference on 24 September, was “a watershed”, Smith said.

“There is an enormous choice, a choice of a generation, a watershed for Labour – whether we move forward to becoming once more ... looked at by the country as a credible alternative to the Tories, or whether we recede into irrelevance, being thought of as not able to take back the reins of power from the Tories,” he said.

Asked how he would respond if he lost the contest, Smith said he would continue to make the same arguments, predicting that the party risked new divisions if Corbyn won again.

Corbyn suggests Labour members could have say in choosing shadow cabinet Read more

“Whether I do this on the backbench – which is what I’m intending if I don’t win this, and I am intending to win it – or on the frontbench – is irrelevant,” he said. “There is a risk that if Jeremy does win this contest, we are back at ‘groundhog day’, with Jeremy unable to fulfil that most fundamental task of a leader of the Labour party – holding together the coalition that is Labour, that has always been Labour.”

A spokesman for Corbyn’s leadership campaign described the speech as “yet more negative campaigning from what has been a very negative campaign”.

He said: “It’s time his campaign change the record, and stopped talking down our party and carrying on this ‘project fear’ approach, which only further highlights that he is the disunity candidate in this contest.”

Labour members, the spokesman added, “want a leader who wants to take the fight to the Tories rather than divisively hold press conferences attacking other members and drawing up policy suggestions for Tory manifestos”.

Smith and Corbyn are making last-ditch efforts to outline their alternative programmes as leader. In recent days, Corbyn has made proposals in areas including investment in deprived areas of south-east England, a “digital manifesto”, and the idea of party members helping to select the shadow cabinet.



For his part, Smith has announced a series of pledges aimed at younger voters, proposed a new referendum or election to confirm any Brexit deal, and pledged to counter Conservative cuts to disability benefits.