The Labour peer Lord Falconer, who resigned from Jeremy Corbyn’s shadow cabinet, has said his party must unify after the leadership election or it will “cease to be a proper contender for power”.



Speaking on the Today programme on BBC Radio 4, Falconer, former shadow justice secretary, said the Labour party would have to come together and present a coherent case for government to the public otherwise it would be “incredibly vulnerable”.

His comments come as Labour’s ruling body challenges a high court decision allowing new party members to vote in the forthcoming leadership election, and leadership contender Owen Smith calls for an extension to the leadership campaign.

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The decision was an apparent boost to Corbyn in his battle to remain Labour leader because most new members are expected to support him in the contest against his rival, Smith.

Party officials are going to the court of appeal on Thursday in an attempt to reinstate a block imposed by Labour’s national executive committee (NEC) on 130,000 recruits getting the vote.

Falconer said the party was right to appeal against the high court ruling. “It’s for the NEC to decide what the rules are of any contest,” he told the programme.

“If the result of this high court litigation is that it’s the courts who decide the detail of how an election is going to be fought, then there are going to be even more high court hearings because everybody who doesn’t like a ruling of the NEC is going to go to the high court.”

The peer said Labour has “got to unify” once the leadership result is returned, amid speculation an early election could be called.

“We’ve got to have the leadership election, we’ll get a result in the leadership election, then we as a party have got to unify,” he said. “There’s more speculation about an early election. We as a party have got to come together.

“In relation to what the party has got to do, it’s got to be able to present to the public coherent unified prospectus for government, if we can’t do that then we are divided and we are incredibly vulnerable.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Lord Falconer said the Labour party had to present a coherent case for government to the public otherwise it would be ‘incredibly vulnerable’. Photograph: Jeff Overs/BBC/PA

Responding to claims by the Labour deputy leader, Tom Watson, that Trotskyist entryists have infiltrated the party, Falconer said: “The vast vast majority of new members have nothing to do with Trotskyist entryists, 99.99% have joined because they want a new politics that we as a party can completely reflect.

“I’m sure there may be some individuals who are old Trots, old members of Militant, who were expelled in the 80s who are using the wholly new situation in the Labour party to come back. They’re trying to take advantage of events to their end but that is not what the main waves are in the Labour party.”

Meanwhile, Kate Green, the chair of Smith’s leadership campaign, has written to the general secretary of the Labour party, Iain McNicol, calling for a two-week extension to the leadership contest following last week’s high court ruling.

She warned that “giving some members as little as a week between confirming their vote and ballot papers landing is not sufficient time for them to gather the information they will wish to have about the candidates before they cast their vote”.

The NEC decided that full members would not be able to vote if they had not had at least six months’ continuous membership up to 12 July.

Five new members challenged the move and accused the NEC of unlawfully freezing them out of the leadership contest despite them having “paid their dues”.

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Mr Justice Hickinbottom, sitting in London, declared on Monday that refusing them the right to vote would amount to a breach of contract.

The party’s appeal will be heard on Thursday by Lord Justice Beatson, sitting with Lady Justice Macur and Lord Justice Sales.

Corbyn’s allies urged the party not to appeal against the ruling, stating that members’ money should not be used to try to prevent them from voting.

John McDonnell, the shadow chancellor, rejected the idea that allies of Corbyn supported the ruling only because it could benefit the incumbent.

McDonnell, who is chairman of Corbyn’s leadership campaign, said that when people joined they were told “very clearly” they would be able to vote in the leadership contest, and “to deny them that democratic right flies against all the traditions of our party”.

On Thursday evening in Gateshead Corbyn and Smith will face questions from party members and supporters in the second leadership hustings event.

On Wednesday Labour’s civil war entered a bitter new phase with Corbyn and his deputy, Tom Watson, locked in a public spat about whether the party risks being taken over by hard left activists who were driven out in the 1980s.



Watson sent the leader’s office a four-page document, based on publicly available information, detailing what he said was evidence that Trotskyists had been attending meetings of the grassroots pro-Corbyn pressure group Momentum and seeking to influence the Labour leadership election.

He claimed some of the individuals involved were members of other parties, including the Socialist party, the successor to Militant, whose members were expelled from the Labour party by Neil Kinnock.



The evidence included reports from the Socialist party’s website of its members addressing Momentum rallies, and tweets from an activist expelled from Labour this year who appeared to be running phone banks backing Corbyn in the leadership race.

Watson’s letter was a riposte to the accusation made on Tuesday by Corbyn’s campaign that he was “peddling conspiracy theories”, after he said in a Guardian interview that Labour was at risk from “Trotsky entryists”.

Watson wrote: “It’s not a conspiracy theory to say that members of these organisations are joining Labour. It’s a fact.”

The Socialist party’s leader, Peter Taaffe, a founder member of Militant who has continued to be involved since the 1980s, told the Guardian earlier in the day that he hoped to be readmitted to the Labour party if Corbyn saw off the leadership challenge from Smith.

He said Corbyn was opening Labour up “to all strands of socialist and working class opinion” and rejecting control of the party by a “top-down, centralised elite”. He added: “The lava of this revolution is still hot.”

The Socialist party published an editorial on Tuesday that argued for a Labour split, even if it meant the party was left with just 20 MPs. “The civil war, now it is out in the open, cannot be simply called off,” the editorial said.

Taaffe said: “[Watson] is referring to entryists, but we were not entryists, we were born in the Labour party, and we were expelled because we fought Thatcher in Liverpool and defeated her.” He insisted that Labour MPs critical of Corbyn could not “stop the winds of history as they’re developing at the moment”.

Smith’s campaign received a fillip on Wednesday when he was endorsed by the GMB union after he won a ballot of its members by 60% to 40%. Its general secretary, Tim Roache, said: “GMB members cannot afford for Labour to be talking to itself in a bubble for the next five years while the Tories run riot through our rights at work, our public services and our communities.”

Corbyn’s allies blame the result on “GMB political officers close to Watson” and claimed that the ballot question – “Who do you think is best placed to lead the Labour party to a general election victory and serve as prime minister?” – was a leading one because it made reference to electability.

The former shadow chancellor Chris Leslie ridiculed that claim. “If you don’t think you can be considered as a potential future prime minister, then what sort of leadership are you talking about? This boils it right down to whether we just want to be some sort of protest movement,” he said.