LABOUR MPs have insisted “we want our party back” as deputy leader Tom Watson today is set to hold emergency talks with trade union leaders in a last-ditch attempt to avoid a damaging leadership contest.
Mr Watson will meet the union chiefs after a fresh attempt by him to persuade Jeremy Corbyn to step down fell on deaf ears.
READ MORE: Angela Eagle in clear threat to Jeremy Corbyn over Labour leadership
At a one-to-one meeting at Westminster, the Midlands MP told his leader he could not carry on without the backing of the party's MPs, who last week voted overwhelmingly in favour of a vote of no confidence in him.
Sources explained how Mr Corbyn responded by making clear he had no intention of leaving and put out a defiant video appeal to supporters to unite behind his leadership.
Last night at the weekly meeting of the parliamentary Labour party at Westminster, Mr Watson told MPs his meeting with the trade union leaders was the “last throw of the dice".
READ MORE: Angela Eagle in clear threat to Jeremy Corbyn over Labour leadership
Insiders said the meeting heard MPs say they wanted their party back with one backbencher claiming it had now been taken over by Marxist-Leninism.
Lord Kinnock, the former party leader, said to cheers that Labour believed in parliamentary socialism not anarcho-syndicalism.
Neither Mr Corbyn nor his key ally John McDonnell, the shadow chancellor, were at the meeting.
Earlier, Ms Eagle, the former shadow business secretary, who had been expected to launch her bid for the top job last week, warned that the threat of a contest had not gone away, stressing how there were many people, MPs, party members up and down the country, asking her to resolve the crisis.
READ MORE: Angela Eagle in clear threat to Jeremy Corbyn over Labour leadership
The Merseyside MP added: "I have the support to run and resolve this impasse and I will do so if Jeremy doesn't take action soon."
Mr Corbyn's predecessor Ed Miliband reiterated his call for the leader to stand down, warning that Labour could end up in "civil war" if a means could not be found for him to leave.
But Mr McDonnell suggested Labour MPs were engaged in "mass hysteria" and needed to "calm down".
And he also insisted Mr Corbyn was a winner, having secured victory in byelections and council seats but he claimed that the party leader was in no way to blame for Labour's collapse in Scotland, saying: "Scotland was lost to Labour before Jeremy became leader."
In his video, posted on Twitter, Mr Corbyn made clear he was carrying on with the responsibility given to him by an overwhelming majority of party members and called for Labour to "come together now".
He swatted away claims that he had half-heartedly campaigned for EU membership and so contributed to the vote for Brexit, pointing out that two thirds of Labour voters had backed Remain.
Mr Corbyn insisted his party had won every by-election it stood in since he became leader and increased majorities in some seats and he took credit for forcing the Tories into U-turns on cuts to tax credits, disability benefits and police funding, along with the forced academisation of schools in England.
In the video, the Labour leader said he wanted to talk directly to party members, noting how 60 per cent of them had voted for him just nine months ago.
“I have a huge responsibility, I'm carrying out that responsibility," he declared.
Mr Corbyn stressed how Labour’s growing membership wanted and expected “all of us, me as leader and members of Parliament, to work together in their interests, the interests of everyone in this country, to achieve a better society, better standards of living and real equality in the future. That's what the Labour Party stands for".
But his message was compared to a "hostage video" by his critics with one source dismissing the "continued acts of desperation" from the leader. It was posted after yet another frontbencher, Fabian Hamilton, the shadow Foreign Office minister, resigned, citing the lack of parliamentary support for Mr Corbyn.
Elsewhere in an interview with The House magazine, Lord West, the former First Sea Lord and former Labour security minister, unleashed a broadside against Mr Corbyn, saying he was "seeking to destroy" Labour and turn it into the socialist workers’ party.
He accused the Labour leader of “betraying British people” by attempting to make the Opposition a unilateralist party “by back door”. The peer also claimed Mr Corbyn, a staunch opponent of Britain’s nuclear deterrent, did not have the “mental capacity” to understand the need for Trident.
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