ANDY BURNHAM vowed yesterday to resign from Labour’s front bench if the party advocated scrapping Trident and withdrawing from Nato.

Appearing alongside his rivals for the party leadership at a radio hustings in Stevenage, Mr Burnham indicated that he would find it a struggle to serve under leftwinger Jeremy Corbyn.

He also came under fire for sexism after saying that Labour should only have a woman leader “when the time was right.”

Mr Burnham later said he had meant that the party should be led by a woman when the “right candidate” came on the scene.

Mr Corbyn has not yet called for immediate withdrawal from Nato but his opponents have repeatedly claimed that he would leave Britain unguarded by leaving the aggressive alliance.

Pressed yesterday on whether he would serve in the Cabinet if Labour voiced its opposition to Nato and nuclear weapons, Mr Burnham confirmed that he would not.

“Those would not be policies that I could support. I would not support a policy to leave Nato,” he said at the hustings hosted by BBC Radio 5 Live.

“It would be highly irresponsible with the world as it is right now.

“But you’re jumping several guns. This debate would have to take place in the party … with all respect to Jeremy, one person does not impose a policy across the party in week one.”

Fellow leadership contender Yvette Cooper accused Mr Corbyn of “dodgy economics” in his plan for “people’s quantitative easing,” a flagship policy to fund infrastructure investment.

“It would just push up inflation, it would make us all worse off, it would create a cost-of-living crisis and it is printing money we haven’t got,” she said.

But Mr Corbyn insisted that Labour had lost the general election because it was “not offering an alternative to austerity.”

He said £325 billion had been put into the banks as quantitative easing, essentially a kind of loan, during the banking crisis.

“My suggestion is that we need serious investment in infrastructure, not through expensive private finance initiative but through public investment, and I am suggesting a people’s quantitative easing which will provide that necessary finance to kick-start the development of the economy,” he said.