THE chair of Jeremy Corbyn’s Scottish campaign to become Labour leader has hit out at personal attacks made on the popular candidate and told senior figures in the party to unite behind the frontrunner if he is elected.

Neil Findlay, the Lothian MSP, described the insults hurled against Corbyn as “desperate” and said it testified to his “common decency” that he refused to get drawn into them.

“There is no doubt that it is [Jeremy Corbyn’s] policies that are connecting but it is also the common decency of the man himself as he refuses to be drawn into a political slanging match as insults are hurled by failed political “strategists”, media commentators and politicians past and present whose fingers are slipping one by one from the power they once held,” he said.

Writing for The National, Findlay said he had spent periods of his political career having to put up with party leaders whose views he didn’t agree with and that it was now time for others to “respect the choice of party members and supporters”.

“For the past 25 years I have put my heart and soul into the Labour Party, it hasn’t always been easy and there have been leaders of my party who at different times have stretched members’ loyalty but I and others got our heads down and campaigned for what we deemed to be the wider ideals of the Labour Party and the Labour movement,” he said.

“So just as I respected the views of the party membership in selecting leaders and candidates who may not have been ‘my cup of Tetley’ I expect all members, councillors, MPs and MSPs to respect the choice of party members and supporters this time round.”

He added: “To do otherwise would be an anti-democratic outrage and have potentially catastrophic consequences for the party”.

Findlay spoke out after former Labour leader and Prime Minister Tony Blair renewed his attack on Corbyn, mocking the Islington North MP’s supporters as “living in a parallel reality” and called on them to reject the “Alice in Wonderland” appeal of Corbyn or risk driving the party into an abyss.

In defiance of appeals from the anti-austerity candidate’s rivals to resist further interventions, Blair issued a fresh warning that the party would become unelectable.

Writing in The Observer, he conceded appeals from himself and ex-leaders Gordon Brown and Neil Kinnock appeared only to have emboldened those who have propelled the veteran MP from rank outsider to frontrunner to succeed Ed Miliband.

He accepted he had as yet failed to understand the “powerful” phenomenon behind Corbyn’s popularity or how best to respond to it.

With less than two weeks until the result of the election is announced, Corbyn remains the bookmakers’ overwhelming favourite to win over experienced former cabinet ministers Andy Burnham and Yvette Cooper and Blairite rival Liz Kendall.

In a separate development yesterday Gordon Brown attacked the Conservative Government for stoking a “dangerous and insidious” English nationalism that he said is pushing England and Scotland apart.

The former Prime Minister told an audience at the Edinburgh International Book Festival that the future of the Union would be determined in the next 12 months by events in England rather than in Scotland.

Brown said that post-referendum Scotland was at a turning point facing two futures, a choice between a 19th-century model of “absolute sovereignty” and a new model of “shared sovereignty” that recognised the interdependence of the world economy.

But he warned that nationalism in England was a factor that Scotland had no control over and was one that had “changed dramatically” over the last year.

He laid the blame at the door of the Conservative Government, which he said had been willing to “turn on the tap” of English nationalism.

Brown highlighted David Cameron’s decision to push for English votes for English laws in the wake of last year’s no vote in the referendum on Scottish independence.

The Tory proposals would create two classes of MP at Westminster and would be unsustainable in the long run, he said.

He also criticised the UK Government’s decision not to devolve the power to top up welfare benefits to the Scottish Parliament as recommended by the post-referendum Smith Commission on further devolution for Scotland.

Failure to do so would leave the Scottish Parliament powerless to mitigate impending welfare cuts, he said.

Repeating calls for a constitutional convention for the UK, he said: “The third thing that I think is dangerous and almost insidious is what happened in the last few months, when clearly the tap of English nationalism was turned on by the Conservatives.”

Neil Findlay: Jeremy Corbyn offers change from failed politics of austerity, spin and insult