Mayor of London Sadiq Khan has admitted that the Labour Party under far-left leader Jeremy Corbyn deserved to lose to Prime Minister Boris Johnson in last month’s general election.
London’s leftist Mayor Sadiq Khan blamed the Labour Party’s “catastrophic” election defeat on the outlandish socialist spending promises of Jeremy Corbyn and the party’s failure to tackle anti-Semitism.
“Hand on heart, did we deserve to win the general election? Probably not, so the British public got it right”, Khan told The Times.
Khan rejected the Corbyn’s post-election statement that Labour had “won the argument” despite losing 60 seats, saying that the party had in fact “lost the argument”.
“What Jeremy and those around him should have the humility to recognise is [they] let Corbyn be Corbyn, and we got pasted,” he says.
Khan said that the Labour Party needs to make structural changes if it stands any chance of winning elections, saying: “It’s not just about changing the lead singer, it’s the whole band”.
“I probably knocked on more doors than any candidate, and people didn’t have confidence in the party and our values. They thought we were making promises just to win votes”, Khan added.
The London Mayor also took aim at the party’s “failure to tackle anti-Semitism”, saying that voters saw Labour as a “racist party”.
“For the leadership not to understand the impact of us being seen to condone anti-semitism is heartbreaking. We’ve demonstrated a breathtaking lack of emotional intelligence — or humanity”, Khan said.
“The ease with which Alastair Campbell was chucked out for talking about voting for another party, and yet you have anti-semites still in, beggars belief”, Khan concluded.
Ahead of the election the Chief Rabbi of the United Kingdom, Ephraim Mirvis, said that Jeremy Corbyn was “unfit for office” over his failure to act in the wake of accusations of anti-Semitism within the Labour Party.
“It is a failure to see this as a human problem rather than a political one. It is a failure of culture. It is a failure of leadership. A new poison – sanctioned from the top – has taken root in the Labour Party,” he said.
Follow Kurt on Twitter at @KurtZindulka
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