A generation’s work on modernising the Labour party has unravelled in the space of 12 months, George Osborne has said, and the party’s move to the left represents “a real risk to Britain’s security”.

In an interview with the New Statesman, the chancellor said Jeremy Corbyn’s candidacy for the Labour leadership had pulled Yvette Cooper and Andy Burnham further to the left, and it was not good for the country to have “an opposition heading off to the wilderness”.

“I can’t help noticing that, for most of my childhood and early adult life, a succession of Labour party leaders reformed the constitution of the Labour party,” Osborne said.

“Neil Kinnock did, John Smith did, Tony Blair did, to make sure that it was more rooted in what the British people wanted. And it does seem, as an external observer, that a generation’s work has been unravelled in the space of 12 months.”

Osborne said the labour movement was heading in the wrong direction and the Conservative party’s response should be to occupy the centre ground and “look forward, not back”.

“If they want to go back to the 1980s, let them,” he added. “The Conservative party is not doing that. We’re moving forward into the 2020s.”

Osborne repeated his view that policies such as nuclear disarmament championed by Corbyn were out of step with the views of the British people.

“But we don’t regard what is being said in the Labour leadership contest as a joke,” he said. “We take it deadly seriously. I regard these things as a real risk to Britain’s security were they ever to have the chance to be put into practice.”

Writing in the Sun last month, Osborne said “an unholy alliance of Labour’s leftwing insurgents and the Scottish nationalists” would shatter decades of near-unbroken Westminster consensus in favour of maintaining a nuclear capability.

In his New Statesman interview, Osborne denied that he was already planning to succeed David Cameron as Conservative party leader when Cameron steps down – “I’m not addressing that now. I’m not thinking about that now” – and said the Liberal Democrats’ “all things to all people” approach had caught up with the former coalition partners in May’s general election.

“That potpourri of centre-right liberals, Iraq war rebels, Celtic fringe Methodists [and] local populists turned out not to be very coherent,” he said.



The result of Labour’s leadership election will be announced at a special conference on Saturday.