Agencies/London

Harriet Harman has been urged to suspend the Labour leadership race amid fears it is being warped by a wave of hard-left “infiltrators”.
There is speculation that 140,000 more activists could be eligible to vote than before the general election - with many of them signing up just to back Jeremy Corbyn.
The Communist Party of Great Britain is among the groups that have urged supporters to join Labour and endorse the Islington North MP. Under new rules, they can pay just £3 and take part in the ballot.
John Mann, the Labour MP for Bassetlaw, has written to Harriet Harman, to call for the election to be suspended until proper checks can be carried out on the tens of thousands of new members who have joined Labour since its election defeat in May.
Mann told Harman: “(The election) should be halted. It is becoming a farce with longstanding members … in danger of getting trumped by people who have opposed the Labour party and want to break it up – some of it is the militant tendency-types coming back in.
Meanwhile the frontrunner in the Labour leadership election, Jeremy Corbyn, has said he only wants the support of “genuine Labour supporters” as he sought to dismiss calls for the party to shelve the contest over fears of an “infiltration” by hard-left activists.
Speaking on the BBC1’s Andrew Marr Show yesterday, Corbyn welcomed the influx of Labour members since the election and said: “What is there not to like about young people turning up and being interested in politics? What it’s about is converting Labour into much more of a social movement.”
He also addressed Mann’s fears directly, saying: “I only want people to register as Labour supporters if they are genuine Labour supporters and intend to stay for the longer course.
“Surely the idea of joining a political party just to vote in a leadership election is a bit limited and we should go a bit further. The entryism I see is a lot of young people hitherto not really excited by politics coming in for the first time and saying we can have a discussion – we can discuss our debts and housing problems.”
Corbyn suggested Labour’s full membership fee should be reduced so some of the registered supporters could join the party as full members.
Andy Burnham, one of Corbyn’s rivals for the leadership, said Mann’s allegations about so-called entryism were not helpful and he had no evidence of entryism on any scale. If Mann had any evidence, he should produce it, Burnham added.
“I’m comfortable with people joining the Labour party,” Burnham told Sky’s Murnaghan programme. “Of course there are processes in place to check if somebody is joining for the wrong reasons and the party has got long established procedures to deal with that, and I don’t have any evidence that that is happening on any wide scale.
“If John has evidence then he needs to send it to the Labour party, but we’re in the middle of a debate that is actually now finally capturing attention and I think that’s a good thing because I think the party needs to have this debate and then decide its future direction.
“What we need more than anything now is unity coming out of this contest. People might hear this call as an attempt by the establishment to kind of skew the race one way or another, I think we need to keep it positive. Let’s have the debate and then Labour needs to move forward together.”
Labour frontbencher Caroline Flint, a candidate for the deputy leadership, said she had not seen anything to cause concern. “We have had new members but nothing that causes me concern,” she told Murnaghan. “Look, what I would say is to anybody who feels there is evidence of people who for example are in parties that campaigned against us or who nominated candidates against Labour at the last general election, provide that evidence to Harriet Harman and the party so that they can scrutinise it.”