Jeremy Corbyn ‘isn’t bothered about winning elections’ and is out of touch with reality on immigration, warns Labour donor

JEREMY Corbyn is part of a section of the Labour party who "aren't that bothered about winning elections" but want to uphold the "purity" of the party, a leading donor has said.

John Mills, who is also the chairman of Labour Future, said today that the party faces a "bloodbath" at the 2020 general election as it is being squeezed by Ukip and the Liberal Democrats.

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The businessman said that the party had a "huge divide" between Labour's working class supporters and the "idealistic approach of more metropolitan people".

He added that within the party there were people who were interested in winning elections, and those who were not.

“The Labour Party is very divided into idealists who aren't that bothered about winning elections but are worried about the purity of the Labour Party and its integrity, and other people who are more pragmatic and take the view that unless you win elections you can't change anything, and therefore you may have to compromise."

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And he blasted the Shadow Home Secretary, Diane Abbott, for not having a grip on the realities of immigration.

“People like Jeremy Corbyn and Diane Abbott come from a very ideologically fixed firmament and have some difficulty in adjusting to where the political realities are," he said.

“Their judgement is they would rather stick to some kind of ideological purity rather than compromise by swaying with the wind," he added.

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Unless the party took control of rebranding the party into "an effective electoral force", they would run into huge problems at the next election, Mr Mills warned.

"The Labour Party 's position in the political spectrum at the moment is very shaky and it needs to recover," he said, speaking of the need to attract both Leave voters in the North of England, and also a large proportion of Remain voters.

"The danger is that the onslaught from all these various factors is so great that it could be a real bloodbath in 2020 from which the Labour Party will struggle to recover," he said.

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The Leave campaigner has been a thorn in the party's side of late, warning last month that the party lacked a credible economic policy.

He also said that the party's MPs needed to focus on working to make Brexit a success, because it was "in the party's interest".

"Unfortunately I don't think the whole Brexit issue is doing anything really to help the Labour Party get back on its feet again," he said today. “It's all a bit gloomy."

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He tipped Shadow Brexit Secretary Sir Keir Starmer and Shadow Foreign Secretary Emily Thornberry as future leaders, but said the party needed to do more to show they were serious about winning elections first.

"An opposition’s job is to oppose, but Labour should be very cautious about winning tactical victories at the expense of losing out on the big electoral canvas," he wrote a few weeks back.

"Instead, it needs to throw itself wholeheartedly into making the negotiations as successful as possible."