The Labour leadership contender Rebecca Long-Bailey has said she wants to abolish the House of Lords and would not stand in the way of another Scottish independence referendum.
The shadow business secretary, who is a close ally of the outgoing leader, Jeremy Corbyn, said having “completely unelected people” within the structure of government was wrong and representative of the “Westminster bubble”.
Long-Bailey has hit the nominations threshold by winning the support of 22 MPs and is through to the next stage of the leadership election alongside Keir Starmer, Jess Phillips and Lisa Nandy.
She remains behind Starmer, the shadow Brexit secretary, in early polling of members over Corbyn’s replacement.
She told the Sky News programme Sophy Ridge on Sunday: “I do want to abolish the House of Lords and we’ll be rolling out as my campaign progresses how we intend to really shake up that constitutional package.
“MPs like myself, we’re fed up of the Westminster bubble, and fed up of our communities feeling like decisions about their lives are made in Westminster consistently. We’ve got to shift power and wealth into our communities.”
On how the work of MPs would be scrutinised with no upper chamber, she said: “There would need to be checks and balances in place but to have a set of completely unelected people doing that I don’t think is right. We need to have people who are able, experts and democratically accountable to the community that they represent, not people appointed by parties.”
Long-Bailey, who has positioned herself as the most leftwing of the leadership candidates, also said she could support a second referendum on Scottish independence if she was ever elected prime minister, despite wanting to retain the union.
She said: “I wouldn’t want to inhibit the democracy of people because that’s one of the most fundamental pillars that we’re proud of in this country, but I don’t support in any way the breaking up of Scotland from the UK.
“I’m fully committed to the union and I don’t think that should be shaken in any way, but ultimately the people of Scotland need to make the case and they’ve got their own parliament to determine whether they want to push that and that will be for me as a prime minister to review and to look at.”
She refused to rate Corbyn out of 10 for his handling of antisemitism, but said the former leader did bear personal responsibility for the issue.
“I wasn’t happy with the way our process was being run, I’ll be honest. I don’t think we were dealing with complaints quickly enough and I think that’s quite clear, I’ve been quite vocal about that. I also felt that there should have been a level of independence to the allegations, the way they were investigated,” she said.
Asked if she ever spoke up herself and challenged Corbyn on how the process was working, she said: “I did, I did, I mean I spoke to Jeremy about it, I spoke to the various members of the team, I spoke to various members of the national executive committee about that.”
References to her being the “continuity Corbyn candidate” in the race, were “annoying”, she said, but she agreed she was a socialist.
“It annoys me when people say that and unfortunately, as a woman, it annoys me even more. I’m a person in my own right,” she said.
On running an effective joint ticket with Angela Rayner, who is standing to be deputy leader of the party, she said: “We always joked, to be honest, that the pair of us, that if it ever goes wrong, ‘you know it’s going to be me and you that’s going to have to sort it out’… and then when we had the defeat and it was devastating.
“We both sat down and was like, you know we were joking, you know we actually are going to think about this.”
Meanwhile Emily Thornberry, who is also hoping to become leader, said she believes she has enough nominations to become the fifth leadership candidate to go through to the next phase of the election.
The shadow foreign secretary, who was once one of the most prominent people in Corbyn’s team and deputised for him at prime minister’s questions, has so far struggled to get support for her bid. She has 10 nominations but expects to hit the threshold of 22 nominations by Monday afternoon’s deadline.
She told the BBC’s Andrew Marr show: “From the conversations I’ve had this weekend I’m fairly confident that so long as I don’t get any slippage, I’ll be fine. I’ll get across the line and then we move on to the next stage.
“I’ve been a slow starter but I did start from a standing start after the general election.”
The former barrister, who backed remaining in the EU and a second referendum, said she could withstand the ups and downs of the leadership contest as she comes from a long line of “tough old birds”.
