GORDON Brown appeared to begrudgingly back Jeremy Corbyn to be the next Prime Minister.
In 2015, the Scot made a dramatic intervention in the Labour leadership race to warn voters not to back Corbyn and become “a party of permanent protest, rather than a party of government”.
But after running Theresa May close in June’s snap General Election, and with a Yougov poll published yesterday giving Labour a three point lead, Brown admitted that “Jeremy is a phenomenon”.
Brown said the “centrists” had no answers and Corbyn had understood public anger, and like Donald Trump in America, and Emmanuel Macron in France, had successfully connected with voters.
“People feel, rightly or wrongly, that the problems that they have – stagnant wages, inequality, polarisation between rich and poor, public services not being properly financed – are down to the failures of governments, centrist governments that have not been able to manage globalisation,” Brown said during a radio interview.
He added: “[Corbyn] has come through because he expresses people’s anger at what’s happened – the discontent.
“When he attacks Universal Credit, he is speaking for many people; when he says the health service is underfunded, he is speaking for many people.”
Meanwhile, Labour were rocked by another sexual harassment scandal, as one of the party’s MP said she had been on the receiving end of inappropriate behaviour by Kelvin Hopkins.
Kerry McCarthy, the MP for Bristol East, claimed to have been pestered by Hopkins for more than 20 years.
Hopkins was suspended from the party last week after Ava Etemadzadeh alleged the veteran MP sent her an inappropriate text and rubbed his crotch against her.
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