Jeremy Corbyn Elected As Labour Leader In Landslide Victory

Jeremy Corbyn, Islington North MP, has been elected as the Labour party leader following a landslide victory.

The anti- austerity and anti- war MP has promised to lead a Labour “fightback”

Having spent his entire 32-year career in the Commons on the backbenches, Corbyn promised to fight for a more tolerant and inclusive Britain  and to tackle the “grotesque levels of inequality in our society”.

Tom Watson has been elected as the new Deputy Leader.

RT reports: The 66-year-old winner of one of the key races in recent times has been announced in London.

“Can I start by thanking everyone who took part in this democratic election,” Corbyn said in a victory speech, calling the election a “huge democratic exercise” for millions of people.

Corbyn, an admirer of Karl Marx, won 59.5 percent of the ballots cast, or 251,417 votes, in the leadership election, winning in the first round.

#Corbyn wins in all three voting categories. So much for all the hype about ‘infiltration’. pic.twitter.com/XOuV2JcjwV

— Matt Wrack (@MattWrack) September 12, 2015

Corbyn pledged that the Labour party would become “more inclusive, more involved, and more democratic. It will shape the future for everyone,” he said. He added: “Let us be a force for change in the world.” “Poverty does not have to be inevitable. Things can, and they will, change,” he vowed. “The Tories have used the economic crisis of 2008 to impose a terrible burden on the poorest people in this country,” Corbyn told an audience of Labour members and supporters at a conference in London called to announce the leadership results Saturday.

59.5% is now officially the number of hope. Let’s do this! #labourleadership — David Schneider (@davidschneider) September 12, 2015

Given that David Cameron has hinted that he will not run for a third term as prime minister, Corbyn’s rise has put the long race to succeed him as the next potential challenge.

“I am fed up with the social cleansing of London by this Tory government,” he said of Cameron’s Conservatives.

Imagine being Tony Blair, having devoted yourself so publicly & completely to telling your party to defeat Corbyn, then getting this result.

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) September 12, 2015

“The speech Jeremy Corbyn made was wonderful,” Neil Clark, a British journalist and writer, told RT.

“It’s a wonderful day for British democracy… Don’t forget, over 400,000 people voted, it’s the biggest party leadership election campaign in our history,” he added.

“What this campaign showed is a massive disconnect between the establishment elite who told us Corbyn couldn’t win. First they tried to make fun of him, they’ve done it all the way through, they attacked him, it was a terrible smear campaign that went for the last two or three months, trying to link him to extremist people, and it all backfired because he won nearly 60 percent of the vote. I think it tells how out of touch these media gatekeepers are. The British media was overwhelmingly hostile to him. You can count on one hand the number of journalists who actually supported him in the British media,” Clark said.

Many fear that Corbyn’s victory could potentially divide the party, however.

“The Labour party members have spoken. They overwhelmingly – 60 percent – want Jeremy Corbyn to lead the party and take it a very different direction to what Tony Blair wanted them to go which was support for more illegal wars, more austerity, more privatization.”

“It’s up to them to realize that the game is over, really, for their kind of policies,” Clark said, adding that “the ball is right now in the Blairites’ [camp].”

“Are they going to be good sports and accept the results or are they going to try to overthrow Jeremy Corbyn, try to topple him – well, let’s hope that they do accept the result,” he said.

Numerous polls have put the Chippenham-born left-winger ahead of his rivals, Andy Burnham (the shadow health secretary), Yvette Cooper (shadow home secretary) and Liz Kendall (shadow minister for care and older people.)

In the video below Jeremy Corbyn celebrates his election win by singing in a London pub.