LONDON
The frontrunner to lead Britain’s main opposition party has promised to apologize for his country’s role in the Iraq war.
Jeremy Corbyn, the left-wing candidate in the Labour Party’s leadership election, said he would apologize for the “deception” under then-leader Tony Blair that saw the U.K. join the United States in the 2003 conflict.
He told The Guardian newspaper: “It is past time that Labour apologized to the British people for taking them into the Iraq war on the basis of deception and to the Iraqi people for the suffering we have helped cause.
“Under our Labour, we will make this apology.”
Corbyn was among the 84 Labour MPs who voted against the war in a 2003 parliamentary motion, which passed with the backing of the center-right Conservatives.
He told the newspaper on Friday: "Let us say we will never again unnecessarily put our troops under fire and our country’s standing in the world at risk. Let us make it clear that Labour will never make the same mistake again, will never flout the United Nations and international law.”
The pledge comes in the week that Labour party members and registered supporters began to vote in the leadership contest, triggered after Ed Miliband resigned following defeat in May’s general election.
Corbyn has promised to nationalize utilities and the rail network, raise taxes and increase public spending, as well as scrapping Britain’s nuclear weapons. His campaign has attracted younger voters in particular, triggering comparisons with European left-wing movements like Syriza in Greece and Spain’s Podemos.
However, senior Labour figures, including Blair and Gordon Brown, have publicly warned that a Corbyn victory would make the party unelectable.
They were joined this week by The Economist magazine, which wrote in an editorial that Britain needed “an opposition that lives in the real world and a united, focused government.
“With Mr. Corbyn as Labour leader, it risks having neither,” it said.
The result of the Labour leadership election will be announced at a special meeting on Sept. 12.
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