Jeremy Corbyn Wins Labour Party Leadership And Emerges Victorious With 61.8 Percent Of The Vote

It is a proud day for the U.K. today as Jeremy Corbyn has firmly won the Labour Party leadership with a massive landslide of 61.8 percent of the votes from over half a million Labour party members and their supporters. An astonishing 77.7 percent of those that were eligible to vote did so, and Corbyn won by a margin of 313,209 votes compared to 193,229 for rival Owen Smith. Jeremy has not only won the Labour Party leadership again, but he has also managed to significantly increase his number of votes over the past year. He topped all three categories with registered supporters, affiliated supporters and party members to beat Owen Smith. While it has been an extremely long year of being beleaguered by members of his own party and in-fighting, after Jeremy Corbyn’s second win today he called upon the Labour Party to “respect the democratic choice that’s been made.”

“We have much more in common than divides us. As far as I’m concerned, let’s wipe the slate clean from today and get on with the work we’ve got to do as a party together.”

But with the kind of enemies Jeremy Corbyn has, there will almost definitely be an uphill battle ahead. After all, in June there was a secret ballot by Corbyn’s very own Labour Party that turned in a 172-40 no confidence vote against him, and it was expected that he would resign from the party leadership. As Jeremy is a very principled man, he was not going to let this vote stop him and vowed to continue. He gave an impassioned speech, explaining that he had been democratically elected and would absolutely not be resigning and that there was no constitutional legitimacy whatsoever to Labour’s vote.

“Labour has the responsibility to give a lead where the government will not. We need to bring people together, hold the government to account, oppose austerity and set out a path to exit that will protect jobs and incomes. To do that we need to stand together. Since I was elected leader of our party nine months ago, we have repeatedly defeated the government over its attacks on living standards.”

Since the no confidence vote, many in the Labour Party have tried to topple Corbyn, but he has remained impervious. The BBC reported Diane Abbott, the Shadow Health Secretary, as saying that Jeremy Corbyn’s political enemies had “thrown everything but the kitchen sink at him.”

Why does Jeremy have so many enemies when he is so wildly popular with the U.K.’s Labour voters? Quite a lot of Labour Party members are convinced that the only way the ruling Conservative Party can be toppled is with an electable leader. To this end, they have tried to convince voters that Owen Smith is a better choice to run their party, but once again the voting public has shown that Corbyn is actually very electable after all, as evidenced by the overwhelming support he received whenever an election was called, in both September 2015 and today.

Surprisingly J.K. Rowling, who was helped enormously at the start of her writing career by Labour government funding, has also been outspoken in her criticism of Jeremy Corbyn. She sided with Owen Smith and those that put in a no confidence vote against Jeremy, explaining that the Conservative government would be here to stay if Corbyn was elected again. J.K. Rowling’s anti-Corbyn stance exploded in August when she received a barrage of angry Tweets from Jeremy supporters. One Twitter follower left a message calling her a “billionaire centralist, not a persecuted leftie.”

One day in the far distant future we’ll look back and we WONT LAUGH, LABOUR, BECAUSE THIS ISN’T BLOODY FUNNY. — J.K. Rowling (@jk_rowling) August 31, 2016

One can perhaps understand that there is a sense of frustration with politics in general these days, but despite the Labour Party’s best efforts to find another leader that they consider more viable, the fact still remains that Jeremy Corbyn is here to stay and as Jeremy Corbyn’s win today shows, the U.K.’s Labour voters are firmly on his side. This likely means that they already have a winning candidate that is sure to fight a good battle against the Conservative leadership and have no reason to fear.

[Featured Image by Kirsty Wigglesworth/AP Images]