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Corbyn defends using speech passage written in 1980s

LONDON (Reuters) - The new left-wing leader of the opposition Labour Party on Wednesday defended using sections of a speech written in the 1980s that were rejected by five of his predecessors. Jeremy Corbyn used his first Labour conference speech as leader on Tuesday to accuse the government of favouring the rich, and to promise a new, kinder politics. But hours later it emerged that one of the most impassioned passages was lifted from a previous speech written by author and former political adviser Richard Heller, prompting newspaper headlines such as "New Politics, Old Speech". The decision to include the passage will provide ammunition for Corbyn's critics, who have mocked him for what they say is a return to Labour's hard-left heyday in the early 1980s, the start of an 18-year period of opposition. "There were 5,000 words and more in my speech, there were 350 words sent to me by Richard Heller ... I quite liked those words, I quite liked the way he'd put them. We changed them around a little bit," Corbyn told the BBC on Wednesday. "I don't think there's anything particularly bad about that ... It's not copying anybody's homework. All of us research things, all of us resource things, all of us learn from each other. Is that such a bad thing?" Heller said he was "delighted" the passage, which he first wrote for Neil Kinnock, Labour's leader in 1983, had been used. "I have always been proud of that passage, both for its content and its cadences, so much so that I have offered it regularly to every Labour leader from Neil Kinnock onwards and to other Labour speakers," he wrote on the Guardian newspaper's website. "As with every other new Labour leader, I offered it to Corbyn shortly after his election." (Reporting by William James and Kylie MacLellan, editing by Estelle Shirbon)