Jeremy Corbyn: give Labour more time to develop appealing policies

Jeremy Corbyn has pleaded for more time for Labour to develop appealing policies and said demographic change rather than questions over his leadership were the cause of his party’s defeat in the once safe Copeland seat last week.

In an interview with the Guardian, the party leader also said a report on the byelection defeat would be delivered to the shadow cabinet and the national executive committee meetings on Tuesday as the row over the causes drew in the party’s deputy leader and leader of Unite.

Corbyn said he accepted a share of responsibility for the loss of Copeland because he was party leader, but said the lack of local alternatives to jobs in the nuclear industry, inadequate rail services to Cumbria and a long-term decline in Labour support in the seat were to blame.

“Well, I’m leader of the party and people obviously have a view, perceptions, about party leaders, and I have mine,” he said, implying he did not agree that his style of leadership was at issue.

“There’s also a longer term issue in Copeland that the Labour vote has actually been unfortunately going down for quite a long time and the area has changed; the area also needs an investment plan so it doesn’t need to rely solely on nuclear but relies on other industries as well.”

After giving a speech to Scottish Labour’s spring conference, Corbyn said it was at the early stages of a “cumbersome” and long-term process of developing new policies, on social affairs, industrial investment and the economy, through a series of roadshows and “democratic” engagement with voters.

“I do my best to reach out to people,” he said, before criticising reporting of his party and leadership: “Clearly persuading our wonderful media in Britain to report what we say on policy will be a big achievement and that we’re working on.”

Corbyn implied that the defeat in Copeland could be discounted as a temporary event. “We have policy development going on and clearly there’s a slight conundrum here, in that I was elected leader on a platform of challenging austerity, which I think you will concede we have done and do, and will continue to,” he said.

“But there’s also a question of democratic policy-making. That is longer and slightly more cumbersome than calling in a few experts into my office to tell me what the policies should be.”

He added that Labour’s victory in Stoke, the heavily pro-Brexit seat where it held off a challenge from Ukip, and the energy Labour put into the Copeland contest could not be discounted. Stoke was “written off by many people, saying: ‘Well, Ukip are bound to win there because of their already strong position.’ We didn’t run away. We fought the campaign in Stoke and we won. And that is historic.

“Imagine, if Ukip had won that byelection in Stoke, what the mood would now be in Ukip and around the country. I think it’s of historic importance what we achieved in Stoke.”

Earlier, a war of words erupted between Labour’s deputy leader, Tom Watson, and the Unite union boss, Len McCluskey, a key ally of the Labour leader. Watson said allegations that disunity among MPs was to blame for the Copeland result were frustrating given that long-time supporters of Corbyn such as McCluskey and the Unison general secretary, Dave Prentis, had been critical or silent.

“Those people who are Jeremy’s cheerleaders, who made sure that he was elected a second time last September, they should be sticking with their leader in the bad times, not just the good,” he told ITV1’s Peston on Sunday. “Dave Prentis has spoken out, but I’d say to you this morning: ‘where’s Len McCluskey defending his leader in this difficult time?’ It shouldn’t be just down to me.”

McCluskey, who is fighting his own re-election battle, had made no comment on the Copeland result until Sunday afternoon, when a Unite spokesman hit back at Watson but made no mention of support for Corbyn.

“Len McCluskey will take no lessons in loyalty from Tom Watson,” the spokesman said. “Len McCluskey’s job is to address the issues uppermost for Unite’s members. He has been working flat out to defend Unite members’ pensions in the nuclear sector and at BMW and to save Vauxhall jobs and plants. He will leave the political posturing to others.”

Corbyn denied he had lost the confidence of McCluskey, whose support and money have been pivotal to both his leadership election victories, and said they had met recently.

Asked why McCluskey had failed to support Corbyn publicly immediately after the Copeland result, he said: “I have no idea what Len McCluskey has been doing since Thursday. I would imagine he has been campaigning for re-election as general secretary of the union but, as I say, I had a very cordial conversation with him 10 days ago. We discussed workers’ rights, we discussed the economy, we discussed social justice and we discussed football.”

He said John McDonnell, the shadow chancellor, was leading events around the UK on developing new industrial and public investment policies. “We are going to be producing some very coherent policies on health, social care, mental health issues and funding. But crucially it’s the economic questions.

“This is exciting involvement in an economic strategy-building across the whole country. It doesn’t necessarily have the same media headlines immediately, but I tell you, in the longer term this is actually a more credible and more solid way of doing things.”

Labour would also reassert itself on Brexit, he said. Only hours after the party was defeated in Copeland, Corbyn met European social parties and business leaders with the CBI, at an event on the continent to agree a new tariff-free trade strategy for the UK and EU. “They will be our allies in those negotiations. That seems to me all positive policy-making and that’s what I’m working on.”

On Friday, Prentis said Corbyn had to take responsibility for what came after the party’s Copeland defeat. The party leader, however, suggested he had not even considered whether he might be at fault. Asked by ITV News on Friday if he had “looked the mirror and asked … ‘could the problem actually be me?’” he replied: “No.”

More than a third of Labour voters now believe the party has the wrong leader, according to a ComRes poll in the Labour-supporting Sunday Mirror. It also found 57% of Liberal Democrat voters would switch to Labour if Corbyn stood down, as well as almost a quarter of Ukip voters.

The shadow attorney general, Shami Chakrabarti, was forthright in pinning the blame for the Copeland defeat on the MPs who challenged Corbyn over the summer. “In Copeland, Labour has looked like the establishment for a long time,” she told the BBC’s Andrew Marr show. “We have suffered from disunity and if we’re always talking about the leadership that won’t help us cut through.”

The former Copeland Labour MP Jamie Reed, a critic of Corbyn who left Westminster for a role at the Sellafield nuclear plant, said Chakrabarti was “the epitome of what Labour voters just rejected”.