CIVIL war has once again broken out within the Labour party. Now Alan Johnson, one of Labour’s most respected figures, has urged his party to “stop the madness” and make sure Yvette Cooper, not Jeremy Corbyn, is elected leader.
Cooper, he says, has “the intellect, the experience and the inner steel” to take on the leadership and help get Labour back into power.
Corbyn, on the other hand, has been “cheerfully disloyal to every Labour leader he’s ever served under,” Johnson writes. Interviewed on television, Corbyn said the consequences of Tony Blair’s “illegal” and “catastrophic” decision to go into the Iraq war with the US “are still played out with migrant deaths in the Mediterranean and refugees all over the region”. Asked if Blair should be charged with war crimes, he said: “If he’s committed a war crime, yes. Everyone who’s committed a war crime should be.”
Any problems that Plaid Cymru have seem very small compared with Labour’s bitter in-fighting that will haunt them for the next 10 years, when they will suffer another 10 wilderness years.

Andrew Nutt
Heolddu Road
Bargoed