Inevitably, the Sunday papers are full of pieces by Labour leadership hopefuls dissecting why their party did so badly and offering their initial prescriptions. They are actually all rather slow out of the blocks as David Lammy said this morning that ‘certainly for people like me it’s absolutely time to step up into a leadership role’.
So in the Observer we have Chuka Umunna, positioning himself, unsurprisingly, as the Blairite candidate. He says the party had ‘too little to say to the majority of people in the middle’ and that ‘we need a different, big-tent approach’ (referencing the master). He also says:
– Labour didn’t engage effectively with fears that it was a spendthrift party and left it too late to ‘sufficiently illustrate that we took deficit reduction seriously’.
– The party should have emphasised the importance of an efficient public sector and decentralising the state.
– Parliament should leave the Palace of Westminster, there should be a serious debate about the electoral system and House of Lords reform.
– Labour needs to have a ‘clearer vision of Britain in the world’ and shouldn’t be pandering to fears about immigration.
Then in the same paper, Stella Creasy has written a slightly more oblique piece about what happens next. Her main point is that the party should blame itself, not the electoral system or the media, for the result. She names some ‘early lessons’ as including the following:
– Economic credibility is what gets you a hearing to talk about the other things that matter to you.
– Campaigning ‘must do more than ask how people vote’, which presumably means more social action as part of local campaigning.
Liz Kendall has also written a piece for the Sunday Times and there will be others who have either penned something for this weekend or who are jotting down thoughts for the next few days. Who the party goes for depends on whether it thinks it lost because it wasn’t left wing enough, or for other reasons, such as those outlined above.
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