LABOUR MPs will seek to beat Jeremy Corbyn “intellectually” with a raft of new policy ideas in order to help broaden the party’s appeal beyond its traditional base and towards Middle Britain, senior party sources have suggested.
Despite the leader’s re-election with an even larger majority than in 2015 and the formation of a new shadow cabinet, there is still great unease among many within the parliamentary party and a belief that Mr Corbyn simply cannot take Labour to victory and become the next prime minister.
Hilary Benn, sacked as shadow foreign secretary, who is now the new chairman of the Commons Brexit committee, conspicuously dodged answering whether the Islington MP would make a good premier, saying simply: "I hope we are going to win the next election.
"We have got a big task on our hands. Jeremy is leader and I congratulated him on his victory. The party now wants to come together and hold the Government to account.
"But the challenge for every single one of us in Labour is to win the people's trust and confidence and we have got a lot of work to do to do that."
One leading party figure said that while Mr Corbyn had the numbers in terms of the wider party, there was still a large majority against him at Westminster; in June more than 80 per cent of Labour MPs said they had no confidence in their leader.
“We can now use the backbenches to come up with a whole raft of new ideas to challenge him and defeat him intellectually,” he said. The UK party has already decided to support the renewal of Trident despite opposition from the leader.
Angela Eagle, the former shadow business secretary, who began the summer challenge to Mr Corbyn’s leadership, also noted: "We've got a very experienced load of people on the backbench who have more time than they would have if they were doing frontline duties to think about the key things that we now need to think about as a party."
But the Merseyside MP insisted this was not about undermining Mr Corbyn's leadership but stressed: "We will never be able to return to government if we don't answer the questions that face people in their everyday lives and appeal to them.
"We need to modernise our view of how we deal with the issues that are going on in our economy."
She warned, for example, how growing automation and the consequent loss of jobs was likely to raise major issues, which Labour had to tackle head on.
"When the Labour Party can answer questions like that we will appeal far beyond our base and we'll be in contention for returning to government again", Ms Eagle told ITV's Peston on Sunday.
She insisted Labour frontbenchers did “not have the time" to grapple with such issues and that big beasts on the backbenches should now do this instead.
"The luxury for someone like me now is I have got the time to think about those issues and I want to make a positive contribution to the debate on those issues, which will get us back into government if we come up with the right responses for the people of Britain," she explained.
Ms Eagle decried how the summer leadership contest had been mainly about personalities when it should have been mainly about policies.
As the polls continue to show Labour lagging well behind the Tories – one last week said the governing party had opened up an 18-point lead – the former shadow cabinet member said: "At the moment, we are appealing to our core vote but we are not being able to appeal beyond that and you can see that from some of the polling."
Last week, Labour slipped to third place behind the Liberal Democrats in the Witney by-election.
At the weekend, an Opinium survey for The Observer showed Theresa May was trusted by more than twice as many voters than Mr Corbyn to run the economy well and handle Brexit negotiations effectively.
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