Labour's soul-searching begins as modernisers attack Miliband 'mistakes'
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Version 0 of 1. Labour is facing probably the most fundamental debate about its ideological direction for two decades as a phalanx of modernisers tore into “the terrible mistakes” of Ed Miliband’s leadership on Sunday, and demanded that the trade unions did not try this week to railroad through a quick timetable for the election of his replacement. The interim party leader, Harriet Harman, told the Guardian that the party would either choose a candidate on a short timetable by July, with nominations closing in mid-June, or wait for the election to end at the autumn party conference. Either way, she insisted, party reforms that reduced the influence of union chiefs in the leadership election would go ahead. She said: “In this election, each person has one vote and each person’s vote will have the same weight. Electoral Reform Services will be sending out the ballot paper and Labour, and not the unions, deciding what is distributed in the ballot paper. There will be no slippage, and no preferential treatment.” The electorate will be the 200,000 party members – anyone registered as a party supporter paying £3 – and those union levy payers who positively state that they support Labour and wish to vote. Any name sent by a union would be checked against the electoral register, she said. “The conduct of this election is being taken out of the hands of the unions and into the hands of the Labour party.” Reflecting on Labour’s disastrous performance in the election, Harman said she believed the twin issues of the party’s reputation on economic management, along with the threat posed by the Scottish National party, contributed to the defeat. In Scotland she said the rot had set in before the 2011 elections for the Scottish parliament. Three party modernisers, Chuka Umunna, Tristam Hunt and Liz Kendall, were touring the broadcasting studios on Sunday testing the water to see if they could gather the 35 nominations from MPs they would need to get on to the ballot paper. There is a concerted effort by party modernisers to drag the party back to the centre ground, and once again associate the party with aspiration and fiscal discipline. Two other potential front-rank contenders, the shadow health secretary Andy Burnham and the shadow home secretary Yvette Cooper, are keeping their powder dry. The former business secretary Lord Mandelson issued an unrestrained attack on Miliband’s leadership, saying on the BBC that the party had made a “terrible mistake” in discarding New Labour. “We were sent off in 2010 on a sort of giant political experiment in which we were sent out and told to wave our fists angrily at the nasty Tories and wait for the public to realise how much they had missed us. They weren’t missing us. They didn’t miss us. Instead they ripped the stripes off our shoulders.” Paul Kenny, general secretary of the GMB, responded by urging Mandelson to return to his deckchair in his back garden. But Mandelson insisted: “Far from embarking on a short-term beauty contest of leaders, what we really need is a very, very thorough debate in the party of the sort that was denied us in 2010. We were sent out and told to say things and to make an argument, if you can call it an argument, that said we are for the poor, we hate the rich – ignoring completely the vast swathes of the population who exist in between. “We cannot open ourselves up to the sort of abuse and inappropriate influence that the trade unions weighed in with in our leadership election in 2010.” His comments amplified those of his fellow architect of New Labour, Tony Blair, who, in an article in the Observer, praised Miliband, but called for a return to the centre ground. “The Labour party has to be for ambition as well as compassion and care,” he said. “Hard-working families don’t just want us celebrating their hard work; they want to know that by hard work and effort they can rise up, achieve.” In his appearance on the Marr show, Umunna demonstrated his belief that Labour needed to break with the past five years when he said that the party needed to recognise that it should not have run a budget deficit going into the economic crash. “We are down but we are not out. We can do this in five years if we make the right decisions now and present that aspirational and compassionate case to the British people, which we are so good at. We can do this. We cannot have a message that anybody is too rich or too poor to be a part of our party”. Hunt said the Labour party needed to appeal to the “John Lewis community”, including those who aspired to shop there and at Waitrose, rather than sticking to appealing to its core vote. “The reason why this debate needs to be long and deep and painful for the Labour party is we are in a real hole. We are in a hole in Scotland and we are in a hole in England and we’ve got challenges in Wales as well. “But the issue in England is this double bind of losing traditional Labour communities often under pressure from Ukip, and not speaking to an aspirational, John Lewis couple.” In an interview with the BBC’s Andrew Neil, Kendall, the shadow care minister, became the first MP to unequivocally declare her intention to stand, though she conceded it would be “phenomenally difficult” to rebuild the party sufficiently around a more attractive pitch to voters in time to defeat the Conservatives in 2020. The party’s national executive is due to meet on Wednesday with pressure from some union leaders for the election to be held on the same timetable as the party’s election for its London mayoral candidate. Harman said: “It is either before the summer or after the summer. There are genuinely pros and cons either way. If it is before the summer, that is quite soon, including for the nomination process. But there is also a view we know the candidates and we should just get on with it.” One union general secretary, Jonn Hammett, of the shopworkers’ union, Usdaw, said: “A quick timetable is not in the interests of the party. We have lost, and lost badly, so we have to have a deep debate, not navel-gazing, but a serious inquiry into why we lost contact with so many voters. A quick beauty parade that might be designed to help one candidate or another will do us no good.” Labour MPs will meet Harman on Monday to discuss the timetable, and calls will also be made at a shadow cabinet meeting for the party to have the discussion about its long-term future that some feel the party has evaded ever since Gordon Brown took over the leadership in 2007. Harman said she had already commissioned a forensic statistical inquiry into what went wrong, and it is expected that she will appoint Chris Leslie as shadow chancellor for now and Pat McFadden as shadow foreign secretary. She said she feared the Tory government would start the parliamentary term very aggressively and Labour needed to be ready to hold them to account. • This article was amended on 13 May 2015. An earlier version said the Electoral Reform Society was running the Labour leadership ballot. That has been corrected to Electoral Reform Services. |