LONDON — Jeremy Corbyn, for decades a left-wing rebel who was relegated to the margins of British politics, became on Saturday the leader of Britain’s Labour Party in a landslide vote that sharpens the country’s ideological divisions.
The result represented an extraordinary rebuke to Labour’s more centrist establishment, especially to former Prime Minister Tony Blair, who had campaigned vigorously against Corbyn and who argued that his selection would mean the party’s “annihilation.”
But interventions from Blair and other party heavyweights apparently did little to halt Corbyn’s momentum, and may have even backfired. As the summer campaign progressed, Corbyn evolved from a fringe candidate who barely made it on the ballot to a grass-roots phenomenon who, white-haired and rumpled at 66, stirred the passions of a new generation of Labour activists.
Corbyn’s rise echoes that of another senior-citizen socialist who has come out of nowhere this year to rattle his party’s center-left establishment. Like Corbyn, Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., has been waging a surprisingly effective insurgency against better-known rivals. But while Sanders is still fighting uphill in his effort to dethrone Hillary Rodham Clinton as the Democratic Party’s nominee for president, Corbyn’s once-quixotic-seeming campaign ended Saturday with an emphatic win.
In a fiery victory speech, Corbyn vowed to combat society’s “grotesque inequality” and make Britain a more humane country.
“We don’t have to be unequal,” he told a crowd of cheering supporters in a London conference center. “It doesn’t have to be unfair. Poverty isn’t inevitable. Things can — and they will — change.”
Corbyn pledged in his victory speech to unify the Labour Party’s polarized factions; he may be helped in that task by Tom Watson, who was elected as deputy leader and is seen as a possible bridge between leftists and centrists.
But within minutes of the results being announced, it became clear just how difficult it will be to hold Labour together, as half a dozen prominent party members announced they would not serve in Corbyn’s shadow Cabinet, the opposition party’s main vehicle for challenging the government’s policies. The Conservative Party also unleashed a stinging attack, with Defense Secretary Michael Fallon saying that Corbyn’s win had made the Labour Party “a serious risk to our nation’s security, our economy’s security and your family’s security.”
Corbyn’s supporters, by contrast, reacted with elation, chanting “Yes we did” as Corbyn made his way around London on Saturday afternoon.
“This is a man who is absolutely principled, who is interested in debate about ideas and who doesn’t care what color tie you wear,” said Laura Parker, 45, who leads a children’s charity. “He doesn’t have every single word that comes out of his mount scripted by somebody else.”
