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THE BATTLE FOR LABOUR – SKY NEWS – 20.00 – 14.09.16

ANY QUOTES USED MUST BE ATTRIBUTED TO SKY NEWS

FAISAL ISLAM: Good evening and welcome to Sky Studios where tonight the two candidates to lead the Labour party will go head to head.  It’s the very last official Labour leadership hustings with leader Jeremy Corbyn and the challenger, Owen Smith, facing each other a week before voting ends.  The two candidates will be joining us later this hour to face questions from our live studio audience: a third of them are Corbyn supporters, a third Smith and a third undecided.  The audience members are being brought into our studio as I speak ready for what I hope will be a passionate debate over the immediate future of this party but first let’s take an in-depth look at the fight for the future of this 116 year old institution.  Sky’s Senior Political Correspondent, Jason Farrell, charts the events that have led us to this bitter and often divisive leadership battle, I should mention Jason’s special report includes some sequences which contain flash photography.
JASON FARRELL: A year ago Jeremy Corbyn swept into the Labour leadership with a massive mandate.  The left wing rebel doubled the membership of the party and yet the moment after Brexit, when MPs could have attacked the Conservatives, they turned on him dissatisfied with his leadership.
??: We need a leader who is going to listen.  
PETER MANDELSON: You have just got to consider sometimes whether you have really found yourself in the right job.  
JF: Owen Smith has emerged as the challenger in a divisive battle that some define as a contest between Labour’s establishment and its influx of new members.  Some fear the fight for the direction of the party is ripping it apart.  And whether you care about Labour or not, with the challenges facing our country can this fragmented party hope to regain power or even offer an effective opposition?  In some ways another leadership campaign is great for Jeremy Corbyn, he is never happier than when on top of a truck speaking to a crowd and, if the polls are right, this contest could cement his position as leader.  You can feel the love for Jeremy in an Islington crowd and the growing membership he’s attracted in the way you just don’t in the corridors of Westminster.
ANGELA EAGLE: I think Jeremy Corbyn has a very 1970s view of the world that hasn’t really shifted very much since then and I think you saw that in some of the policy ideas that came out in his first leadership campaign such as women only train carriages or reopening the coal mines.  
DAVID BLUNKETT: I think the mass influx would not be a problem if it were those committed to the Labour party not just to a cult or to an individual. If you are part of an almost religious fervour, if you are part of a movement that doesn’t in the end give a damn what the consequences are, where they believe what they want to believe.
JF: His grassroots appeal got him elected as leader of the Labour party just one year ago, it was one of the biggest shocks in British political history.  Against initial odds of 100  to 1 he beat the more polished centre ground candidates having been put forward by the left wing of the party.  
JOHN McDONNELL: We went round the table, I said I’ve done it twice and couldn’t even get on the ballot paper, Diane Abbott did it last time and said she’d done her duty and then we looked at Jeremy and said it’s your turn and he said, okay I’ll do it.  That’s the sort of leader …
JF: Was he reluctant?
JOHN McDONNELL: Not reluctant, he was willing to do it on the basis that he’s  committed to the principles that we’re advocating etc but he’s not a careerist. I’ve met too many MPs who come into parliament …
JF: But you have got to be a careerist …
JOHN McDONNELL: No, you’ve got to have ambition to achieve the implementation of the principles and the policies upon which we think we can transform society, that’s what it’s all about.
JF: You probably had a pretty good idea you weren’t going to win.
LIZ KENDALL: Yes, I was under no illusions, I wasn’t going to be winning.
JF: But how did you feel when you saw the huge majority that Jeremy Corbyn got?
LIZ KENDALL: It was what I expected.
JF: How did it make you feel?
LIZ KENDALL: It made me feel worried for my constituents actually, they can’t see him being the Prime Minister and they are worried about things like defence, national security and the economy and they don’t think he’s right on it.  
JF: But MPs were on course for a collision with the tens of thousands joining the party inspired by Mr Corbyn’s anti-austerity message.  And with him came a new political movement set up to mobilise left wing supporters called Momentum.  
CAROLE VINCENT: My name is Carole Vincent and I’m a Labour party member but I am also part of the Momentum movement as well.  Someone who is so aware of world politics and where we are, where Britain is in the world but I know his policies are going to be brilliant in terms of housing, education, jobs and the NHS.
CLIVE LEWIS: I don't think Jeremy Corbyn is too far to the left of the party and I’ll tell you why, I think the party has shifted.  He is a surfer on a wave and it’s the wave that’s as important as the surfer.
JF: But within hours of becoming leader, Corbyn’s struggle was becoming apparent.  Some MPs refused to join his front bench team and his first Cabinet appointments came under scrutiny.  He offered a new style of leadership but this inclusive style somehow wasn’t felt by MPs.
RUTH SMEETH: It’s been really tough, we’ve gone from gaffe to gaffe some of which have really resonated on the doorstep so trying to explain that to him.  I can’t imagine what that was like for him, you’re on the back benches for 30 years and then suddenly you’re the leader of the Labour party, you are speaking from the despatch box and it’s been a really, really tough time for him as much as for anyone else.  
JF: As he tried to adapt to this new role, the left wing rebel was struggling to convince his own party that he was electable.  Mr Corbyn had his own way of describing his awkward relationship with power.
JEREMY CORBYN: This room is far too big for one individual and when I sit in here I feel a bit like a prisoner in a gilded cage.
JF: But just as Jeremy Corbyn seemed to be settling in, his own MPs grew increasingly uncomfortable with his leadership.  At this stage the man who would challenge Corbyn, Owen Smith, was part of Jeremy Corbyn’s Shadow Cabinet. Things simmered, barely beneath the surface, something would soon trigger an eruption.
NEIL KINNOCK: People throughout the Labour movement were extremely alarmed at the prospect of having to fight a general election with Jeremy Corbyn as leader.
JOHN McDONNELL: People thought that if they put pressure on Jeremy he would resign.  They completely underestimated the man.  

END OF PART ONE

PART TWO
JF: Brexit day.  Jeremy Corbyn woke up to political turmoil and some blaming him.  His press team released a script for MPs to use saying he had led from the front but the script was being ignored.  
MARGARET HODGE: I called for a motion of no confidence in Jeremy Corbyn as leader of the Labour party and I hope if the motion is passed he will reflect on his position.
LIZ KENDALL: Jeremy could have been a sort of powerful sceptic for Europe, he could have said look in the past I’ve had concerns but it wasn’t a strong message saying but this is why I think it’s right for Britain now.  
NEIL KINNOCK: Cameron’s resignation in the immediate week of that result, the realistic prospect of an early general election arose, realistic prospect and people throughout the Labour movement including Members of Parliament, were extremely alarmed at the prospect of having to fight a general election with Jeremy Corbyn as leader.
JOHN McDONNELL: What happened was that we had a phone call from the Observer saying that Hilary was contacting Shadow Cabinet members urging them to resign.  Jeremy tried to get hold of Hilary, he couldn’t get hold of him, eventually about midnight he got hold of Hilary, said to Hilary look, I understand this is going on, please withdraw that.  Hilary refused and unfortunately what Jeremy had to do was sack him.  
HILARY BENN: I told Jeremy Corbyn last night that I no longer had confidence in his leadership.
JOHN McDONNELL: Then what happened is that we had a sequence of resignations so clearly the resignations were timed to destabilise us.  People thought that if they resigned and put pressure on Jeremy he would resign.
CAROLE VINCENT: My principles say that if someone has been elected as your leader by a majority of the members then you stick with them, you work with them.
JF: But when the parliamentary party met with their leader in a private gathering, many asked him to resign.  An impassioned speech by Neil Kinnock was secretly recorded.  
NEIL KINNOCK: I was simply telling the truth.  Even someone with a normal amount of modesty, not to say humility, would look at the opinion of the people with whom he worked and say I am unsustainable as the leader.
JOHN McDONNELL: They completely underestimated the man, not because of his own personal characteristics of commitment and dedication but more about the principles he stands for which is he was elected to represent the party with an overwhelming mandate, he wasn’t going to let people down, that’s why he stayed there.  
JF: Jeremy Corbyn tried to pull together a new Cabinet of relative novice MPs. An influx of new members signed up, a court battle ensued when Labour’s ruling body decided that 130,000 members who joined within the last six months wouldn’t be allowed to vote, then followed allegations of a purge.  
CAROLE VINCENT: At the beginning of this year I suddenly got a letter in February to say that in January a decision by the local CLP was that they didn’t really want me to be a member so I then had to fight that and appeal again and go through interview and quote the Labour party values back to the party.
JF: MPs say that if they knew what he was like to work with, the members would think twice about supporting him.
PETER KYLE: I went to see Jeremy once to talk about policy and I asked him about an area of policy that was really important for us down here and it was an area of policy that he is not particularly interested in and he answered a completely different question so I said I need your advice about this particular area of policy so what are your thoughts, how do I speak about this in a way that’s not going to compromise you?  And he sat and his head dropped and he stared at the floor.  He didn’t obfuscate, he didn’t use a rhetorical flourish to avoid answering me, he sat in silence looking at the floor.  That is an example of what it is like being a new MP who is trying to get guidance and leadership and support from a leader that simply doesn’t have the skills needed to lead.
ANGELA EAGLE: I turned the radio on in Wallasey one morning to find out that there’d been an announcement pre-brief on the speech Jeremy was going to be making about companies being banned from paying dividends if they didn’t pay the minimum wage, a completely incoherent policy suggestion.  I knew nothing about it, I’m meant to be the Shadow BIS Secretary.  So I phoned up Neil Coleman who was then the Head of Policy in the leader’s office to ask him what the hell was going on and he knew nothing about it either.  Then I started getting huge numbers of calls from my own Shadow team who were outraged because it is just an unworkable suggestion and nobody knew it was going to be made.  I got calls from journalists and I had to put them off because I didn’t know what was going on.  You can’t have a team approach when that’s going on.
JF: It’s a sign of how bitter this split has become when even former Shadow Cabinet Ministers will spill the beans on their frustrations.  
JOHN McDONNELL: Jeremy and people like me saying tell us what mistakes are made and how we can improve, work with us to improve and overcome those problems and in that way we form a new team. I think that could prove extremely effective.  
JF: But there’s a problem with that, a lot of people say that Jeremy just doesn’t listen.  
JOHN McDONNELL: Well I don’t accept that, he’s the most open politician I’ve met.
JF: Even with the Cabinet, some say there have been announcements made when they haven’t been consulted about them and they are on their brief.
JOHN McDONNELL: Again, if that’s been a problem in the past come and tell us.  We didn’t know that until this coup occurred.  If that’s been a problem in the past come and tell us and we’ll work out a new system of how we work together so people feel in control.
JF: It’s a pretty big criticism though isn’t it?
JOHN McDONNELL: I don't think it’s an accurate criticism but if it is, give us the examples and let’s see how we can learn from that.  We all make mistakes, Jeremy and I have never been in front bench positions but he’s been in parliament thirty years, I’ve been in parliament nearly twenty years, we’re all learning rapidly so I want to learn from our critics.
JF: But something else has cast a shadow over this bitter contest – allegations of abuse, intimidation, misogyny and anti-Semitism.
RUTH SMEETH: In the last 12 months something horrendous has been unleashed.  We were at an event, a self-proclaimed Momentum activist started handing out a press release about deselecting MPs, he was told I was Jewish by someone with me so there was background before the cameras came on.
JF: The event was to announce the findings of an investigation into anti-Semitism within the Labour party.
RUTH SMEETH: This man stood up, asked a question and just started attacking me.  
MAN: I saw that the Telegraph handed a copy of press release to Ruth Smeeth MP, so you can see who’s working hand in hand.  
RUTH SMEETH: At that moment when I tried to defend myself and got shouted down by the audience who had been invited not by the Labour party but by the Leader’s Office and Jeremy stood there. Leadership is about sending a message, it’s also about intervening.  When I saw the video of his interactions afterwards with the person from Momentum it was extraordinary.
JF: But defenders of Mr Corbyn argue he was clear in stating his intolerance of anti-Semitism.
JEREMY CORBYN: Under my leadership the Labour party will not allow hateful language or debate in person online or anywhere else. We will aim to set the gold standard, not just for anti-racism but for a genuinely welcoming environment for all communities.
JOHN McDONNELL: Abuse has been in politics in this country in a way that I think is unacceptable.  Jeremy has made statements condemning that, we now have a system put in place in the Labour party so that if abuse occurs people are suspended and kicked out.
ANGELA EAGLE: I’ve had a lot of personal intimidation but I suppose I expect that because I put my head above the parapet first.  I’ve had death threats but I don’t want to talk about it a lot though because every time I talk about it I just get an avalanche of more of it.  The brick through my office block, I’ve been told that I threw it, that it didn’t happen, that it’s all lies and many, many people retweet that. It did happen and it’s as simple as that.
JF: You’re convinced it’s because you stood as a candidate?
ANGELA EAGLE: I’ve not made any statement about what it was, it simply happened the night I declared, that’s all I’ve ever said about it but it did happen and I didn’t do it.
CLIVE LEWIS: I’ve spoken to colleagues who have had abusive tweets, death threats and it’s completely outrageous, completely unacceptable.  Do I think Jeremy Corbyn has done enough?  I think Jeremy Corbyn has been very outspoken and said he opposes this at every opportunity he’s been asked.
JF: The more than doubling of Labour’s membership in the last 18 months means the party has changed underneath the MPs and the bitter fight in Westminster is accompanied by a chaotic ground war.
NICKY EASTON: They encouraged their members to go and join the Labour party and infiltrate at all levels, that was the wording, it was to take over at every level they could.
PETER KYLE: There are 2200 in my membership now, most of whom I don’t know so of course if they want to deselect me they can deselect me.

END OF PART TWO

PART THREE
JF: In July this year the Brighton Constituency Labour party was suspended and elections for the local party were annulled.  Nicky was voted off the Labour Executive but was told by the national party to stay on.  
NICKY EASTON: My name is Nicky Easton and I’m acting Vice-Chair Campaigns of the Brighton, Hove and District Labour party.  Obviously it is a bit of a weird situation to be in.
JF: What happened here appears to reflect what’s happening across the entire Labour party, there is a battle for ownership and it’s become very bitter. Put simply, a battle between Corbyn’s new Momentum members and the existing party.  Momentum member Greg Hadfield was voted in as a local Labour Secretary before the decision to annul the vote.
GREG HADFIELD: My name is Greg Hadfield, I was elected Secretary of Brighton, Hove and District Labour Party on July 9th and then the results were annulled four days later.  
JF: How do you feel about the fact that the results were annulled?
GREG HADFIELD: I’ve never been more shocked in my life.  Literally within four days of being elected with 66% share of the vote, for no obvious reason the whole of Brighton, Hove and District Labour Party was suspended.  
JF: Some think the party should have been suspended because of the way the elections were conducted.
IVOR CAPLIN: Ivor Caplin, former MP for Hove.  This is meant to be a secret ballot for the Chair of Brighton, Hove and District Labour Party but the ballot papers were placed into an open container.
NICKY EASTON: There were complaints that people who weren’t members were sitting in the hall, there was a whole set of ballot papers and people were grabbing them, multiples of them.  It was impossible to stop them.
JF: Staff at the university building where the AGM was held say they were overwhelmed, partly because the turnout was higher than expected, fuelled by a Momentum Rally that had been held directly before the event.  Indeed several key positions in the ballot went to Momentum members and some say that’s what this is all about.
GREG HADFIELD: The five candidates who won more than 60% of the vote, all of us, happened to mention that we supported Jeremy Corbyn.  The two things are connected.
JF: Daniel Harris is another Corbyn supporter.
DANIEL HARRIS: My name is Daniel, Daniel Harris and I was elected as a lay member. It lasted 24 hours.
JF: Here’s what I’m hearing, things like candidates ushering in people without checking their membership, multiple ballot papers being grabbed, buckets which weren’t necessarily being properly checked when the ballots were going in – you’re smiling, is this all made up?
DANIEL HARRIS: It just makes me laugh, it just makes me laugh.  The problem is you’ve got people like me who is living in emergency accommodation, I’m homeless, you’ve got people like me which are real people that are now the lead members of the biggest party in the country.  That’s not what people want.
JF: So that is why the NEC are investigating this, because they don’t like you?
DANIEL HARRIS: I see it as an attack on people like me, yes, absolutely.  
JF: Some object to Daniel becoming a Labour party administrator as he used to be a Green Party member but Phil Clarke who was elected onto the local executive actually stood against the Labour party three times as a member of the Trade Unionist and Socialist Workers Coalition, most recently last May.
PHIL CLARKE: My name is Phil Clarke, I was elected to the local executive of the Brighton, Hove and District Labour party.  I didn’t think, and I was wrong, that someone like Jeremy Corbyn would ever rise to be leader of the Labour party, I felt it was too undemocratic.  Once that had happened it seemed the obvious thing to do to join, it would seem like standing aside from a very important political process not to get involved.
JF: It’s emerged that the leader of the Labour council wrote an email to members several days before the AGM ballot.  It said ‘Next Saturday our city Labour party faces a takeover from groups of individuals from Momentum, TUSC, the Alliance for Workers Liberty and other fringe left wing groups including people who have repeatedly run against Labour candidates.  
NICKY EASTON: We know that they had a conference or something last November sometime in which they encouraged their members to go and join the Labour party and infiltrate at all levels.  That was the wording, it was to take over at every level they could.
JF: It is alleged that the man elected as local party Chair, Mark Sandell, had a previous political affiliation to the Alliance for Workers Liberty, a revolutionary Trotskyite group.  The AWL website makes references to him as an activist.  Mr Sandell turned down our request for an interview.  
IVOR CAPLIN: I think if we had been able to know that in advance I think most people would have said he was not suitable to be Chair of the local Labour party.
JF: So he was standing for Chair and yet nobody really knows anything about his background.
IVOR CAPLIN: Well that’s been one of the problems, this Momentum fan club has tried and successfully here, at least partly successfully, to infiltrate the Labour party.
GREG HADFIELD: My main concern is that we are getting back to those days when the big political question was ‘Are you or have you ever been?’, the McCarthy question.
JF: But once you know who the candidates are and they have been selected and checked and you go, hang on a second, we’ve got a Chair of our party who used to campaign for another party, we’re concerned about that, is that a legitimate concern?
GREG HADFIELD: If Ivor Caplin is worried about that, he had eleven days to mention it.  When did he mention it first?  Oh I know, it was after they lost.
JF: But who are they losing to?  Is this an echo of the past, of the ultra-left revolutionary groups, the Trotskyites who infiltrated Labour in the 1980s, leading to Neil Kinnock’s famous Bournemouth conference speech of 1985.  
NEIL KINNOCK: [Speech] And you go through the years sticking to that outdated, misplaced, irrelevant to the real needs and you end in the grotesque chaos of a Labour council, a Labour council hiring taxes to scuttle round the city handing out redundancy notices to its own workers.  
JF: The then Labour leader purged his party of the group called Militant and characters like Derek Hatton but is history repeating itself with the emergence of Momentum?
DEREK HATTON: They compare for no real reason other than that they are against the establishment generally and the establishment in the Labour party and the Labour party establishment can be probably the most ruthless when actually it sees itself up against some sort of opposition which is what you’re seeing at the moment.
NEIL KINNOCK: There will be people in Momentum who share the objectives of the ultra-left and the Militant Tendency but Momentum is interesting in the sense that it appears to be a parallel party, for want of a better term, with its own organisation, its own executive, its own contributions, its own membership. That is something with which the Labour party has never had to deal before.
DAVID BLUNKETT: I think we’ve got a very major problem with Momentum and win or lose the battle to take the party back we are still going to have a problem with Momentum because it has become so enmeshed with the Labour party structures, with the local branches and constituencies that this is going to be a major problem for many years to come.  
JF: Some feel the Militant Tendency is creeping back here in Brighton, three decades after Neil Kinnock got rid of them.  Others see this as simple democracy.
GREG HADFIELD: This talk of entryism is just nonsense.  No one has entered or taken over the party in Brighton and Hove, the members have taken back the party in Brighton and Hove and that’s what upset the right wing.
JF: But what does this all mean for the local MP who won a close fought campaign here in 2015 with the help of local members.
PETER KYLE: I walked past homes and I know where each of those people lives because it’s so imprinted on my memory. I  got to know them and they got to know me.
JF: In less than a year his membership had quadrupled with the new intake applying to run the local party.  
PETER KYLE: I was trying to figure out who some of those people were and it was only afterwards that I realised that some of them had actually stood against Labour, some of my own colleagues, people I’d been out with on doorsteps campaigning, out in the rain and the cold, they stood against them.
JF: Now these new members outnumber those who fought with Kyle on the doorstep and some have suggested that he should be ousted as the local MP through a process of deselection.
GREG HADFIELD: I would have concerns about Peter Kyle whose allegiance seems to be more to the Progress party than to the values of the Labour party and his chronic disloyalty.  He said I will not be bullied into uniting behind a loser.  Well who has bullied an MP? And uniting behind a loser, what has Jeremy Corbyn lost?
JF: Are you worried about deselection, do you think it could happen?
PETER KYLE: Of course I do, they have the numbers.  There are 2200 in my membership now, most of whom I don’t know so of course if they want to deselect me they can deselect me.  Everything is in our membership now, we have people who are young and utopian, we have people who are older and suddenly decided after all these years of voting Labour they want to get into the fight because of what the Tories are doing to our party but we also have the Trotskyites and the Revolutionary Communists and all the rest of it who have come in in small numbers who are causing trouble.
JF: Aren’t they too small to cause too much trouble, I mean there aren’t that many Trotskyites.
PETER KYLE: Have you ever been in a room with one of them?
JF: Yes, I have actually.
PETER KYLE: Well I am surprised you are asking the question.  
CLIVE LEWIS: My experience of Momentum, the vast majority of people involved in Momentum are normal decent members many of them, some of them aren’t but the vast majority of them are members of the Labour party who are campaigning for Jeremy Corbyn and want to see what we call a different type of politics.  
JF: In all this turmoil can a relative unknown become the great unifier.  Owen Smith, even though he claims to be left wing, has emerged as the big hope of the progressive moderates within the party but he is already causing his own divisions with his suggestion of a second EU referendum.  Is Smith really the man who can save the party from breaking up?
JOHN McDONNELL: He’ll not win a general election calling for a second European referendum.
ANGELA EAGLE: If we close our minds we won’t move with the times and then we will deserve to die as a political force.

END OF PART THREE

PART FOUR
JF: Jeremy Corbyn’s challenger appears to have come from nowhere.  Owen Smith describes himself as radical and credible.  A Bruce Springsteen fan, he was raised in South Wales, he was a keen rugby player.  The 1984 miner’s strike was his political awakening and he joined Labour at the age of 16 after campaigning on the picket line outside Tata Steel.  Critics say he is too slick, a return to the New Labour model of spin and win and there’s a suspicion that a former lobbyist for a drugs manufacturer might not want an NHS free from private investment.  He insists he is left wing but more electable but polls suggest he hasn’t yet won over the Labour membership.  The hustings so far have highlighted Smith’s objections to Corbyn’s desire to scrap Trident, he wants to fight to remain in the EU, beyond that he often compares himself with the man he is trying to oust.
JOHN McDONNELL: The most common expression used by Owen is ‘I agree with Jeremy’ so I’m hoping that when the leadership election is over, I’m hoping Jeremy wins and then Owen will come back in the Shadow Cabinet and work with us.
JF: That’s part of your pitch isn’t it, that you do have similar policies to Jeremy Corbyn.
OWENSMITH: Well it’s not a pitch, it’s just the truth.  I’m someone who has always fought as a socialist and I’m someone who …
JF: If that’s true why are you more electable?
OWEN SMITH: Because I think there are some key differences between Jeremy and myself.  I think I’m able to speak to a broader set of concerns in the country but in other regards, business wants a Labour party that is going to argue for us to remain within the European Union.
WOMAN: I want to say that I’m a young person and I absolutely love what you’re doing, I want you as a Prime Minister and I also thank you because you instil a lot of hope in me and a lot of other young people.  
JF: Can I ask who you backed last time?
WOMAN: I actually voted for Jeremy.  
JF: Whoever wins, could they become Prime Minister?  Struggling with UKIP in the north and the SNP in Scotland, the next leader will have to answer what and who the Labour party is for.  Worksop has been Labour since before the war.  But in the Miner’s Welfare Social Club the vast majority here voted for Brexit even though most of Labour’s 230 MPs campaigned to remain in the EU.  
JOHN MANN: Some of the Labour wards were 90+% to leave and they didn’t see it coming, that’s a big problem for the Labour party.
JF: Can I get a hands up for who voted to leave the EU?  All of you.  
WOMAN: As far as immigrants are concerned, don’t get me wrong, I’m no colour bar or anything like that, they’re nice people but there’s too many of them now. We’re only an island, you can’t go on forever and like she said, Gisela Stewart, you’ve got to build more houses, you can’t cater for them if you don’t know they’re coming.  
JF: Where do you stand on Owen Smith?
JOHN MANN: He won’t be as bad as Corbyn, he says some smart stuff but if Owen Smith becomes Labour leader he is going to have to change his policy on the European Union instantly because he will get …
JF: But he won’t do that because he sees that as the one thing that differentiates him from Jeremy Corbyn.  
JOHN MANN: Well that’s short term politics isn’t it?  He is trying to appeal to the same out of touch Labour party membership who voted Jeremy in, that’s the problem.  
JF: If Labour seems disconnected with its voters in the north, it is close to an irrelevance in Scotland.  Once a stronghold, now the SNP has 56 seats to Labour’s one.  The Leader of the Labour party in Scotland is backing Owen Smith.
KEZIA DUGDALE: If I was in the position that Jeremy Corbyn is in where I had lost the support of 80% of my parliamentary colleagues it would make my job not just incredibly difficult but impossible and that’s why I think we need new leadership.  Actually their policy platforms are pretty similar, the difference is the credibility, the belief, the desire to be Prime Minister, to achieve a Labour government and that’s what I see in Owen Smith that I didn’t see in Jeremy Corbyn.
JF: Do you think he didn’t want to be Prime Minister?
KEZIA DUGDALE: I am not convinced that that’s what gets him up and motivates him every morning.
JF: But at the Glasgow hustings many say Corbyn is the answer for Scotland.
MAN: We are fully in support of him, he has our confidence and he has the confidence of the majority of people in Paisley.
WOMAN: We overwhelmingly voted for him and that’s where we should be, we should not be doing this leadership contest.
JF: But outside on the streets there is little faith in either candidate.  Do you think either of them can cut through in Scotland against the SNP?
WOMAN: No, I don't think either of them have got it, I really don’t.
JF: Why not?
WOMAN: I just don’t think they’re strong enough.  
WOMAN: I don't think they can do it, the SNP have taken their ground, they have occupied the sort of place that Labour used to occupy so I don't think they’ve a hope.  I think the Tories have got more chance.
MAN: The Labour party just doesn’t have the talents or the means at its disposal that it had 10, 20 years ago and that’s a long term fundamental problem.
JF: It seems both in Scotland and the north of England there’s a frustration of at how a globalised economy has left many communities behind and traditional parties have failed to offer a solution.  While Labour struggles to find a post-Blair ideology, many of its voters have deserted the centre ground.
LIZ KENDALL: I think what we are seeing is both on the right and the hard left, that they are trying to go back, they are going back into the past, turning their back on the world. But you cannot disinvent globalisation and our job, our mission in the Labour party is to make that economy work for old so the country needs an effective Labour party now more than ever before and that actually is ultimately why I’m optimistic because the Tories won’t do it.
CLIVE LEWIS: When you think about it, when you look across Europe, over in America at Bernie Sanders you can see across the Western world, social democracy has been in crisis and there has been a change, there is a feeling that something isn’t working, the system isn’t working, the old style of politics isn’t working and I think Jeremy Corbyn has tapped into that.  
JF: That social uprising goes against the ideology that put Labour into government.  Tony Blair got into Number 10 with centre ground policies embracing business and pushing forward a social reform programme. The left felt it wasn’t radical enough, discredited further by a controversial war. For many, Stop the War campaigner Jeremy Corbyn draws a thick line under the Blairite era but others won’t completely abandon the platform that gave them more than a decade in power.  
DAVID BLUNKETT: There is a mythology pedalled by people who ought to know better that somehow we let people down by being in government and by not being radical enough.  I would be absolutely heartbroken and mortified to see the vehicle that has brought about so much radical change just destroyed overnight.
JF: Those fighting against the party’s transformation if they lose are left with a choice – unite or break away.
JOHN MANN: There will not be a breakaway party.  Do they really think that people like me are going to be forced out the party by some middle class polytechnic lecturer types they’ve got another think coming.  
ANGELA EAGLE: If you don’t move with the times in politics you will cease to exist but if we close our minds we won’t move with the times and then we will deserve to die as a political force.
JOHN McDONNELL: Interestingly enough in the summer we’ve been talking to lots of people.  People have calmed down, they’re slowly coming back, co-operating.  If Jeremy wins, Labour MPs are democrats above all else, they’ll recognise the mandate he’s got and we’ll work together again.  
NEIL KINNOCK: There will be no split.  There won’t be a split because even people with the most deep and firm objections to Jeremy Corbyn, they are not going to leave the party to anyone else, they are going to fight on.  
CLIVE OWEN: Owen, whether he believes it or not, he is a bridge back to the way the party was operating, if you want a more Blairite top down controlled party, a bridge to that.  If he did win I think it would be a staging post back to something which is more regressive and I don't think that’s appropriate for many people.  
KEZIA DUGDALE: I’m embarrassed when I turn on the TV and I look at what my party is doing to itself. It’s not pretty, it’s very far from pretty but the reason that people are so impassioned about it is because they care so deeply about this party and this movement and they want it to achieve great things again and everybody is motivated by what their heart and their head are telling them to do and I think it can be good again.  
JF: But with Labour so fragmented, can either candidate unify the party, form an effective opposition and chart a course back to power?
END