Labour leadership: live debate
Updated on 01 September 2010
Former prime minister Tony Blair warns that the Labour party must avoid swinging to the left or face an "even more stinging" election defeat next time, as the five Labour leadership contenders prepare to battle live on Channel 4 News.
Former prime minister Tony Blair's memoirs, published today, also criticise the party for its loss in the last election.
He put the blame squarely at Gordon Brown's door, and said of the Labour party: "The response, I fear, is obvious. It won as New Labour. It lost by ceasing to be that."
He said the party must not shift to the left after losing the general election.
"If we take this path, the next defeat will be even more stinging," the book said.
His comments come as the five contenders to lead the Labour party prepare to debate live on Channel 4 News, tonight at 7.30pm.
Some have argued the contest is all-sewn up already, with a focus on what contender Ed Balls called the "soap opera" concentrating on the sibling rivalry of the Miliband brothers, also competing to be the new leader.
Jag Singh, one of the co-founders of political blog LabourHome, told Channel 4 News at this stage in the contest "all the challengers are playing for is a good slot in the shadow cabinet."
Also in the race are Andy Burnham and Diane Abbott.
Mr Balls' complaint that the media have made a furore over the Miliband brothers falls on deaf ears.
"There is some meat to brotherly competition story," Mr Singh said.
Who are the five Labour leadership candidates? Find out here
Plus, said Mark Ferguson, acting editor of Labour List, the contest was threatened by dry policy discussions – it badly needed some human interest "which the Milibands have provided in spades".
However, the one dry policy discussion that all the contenders have side-stepped during these last few months of hustings, is the debate over the economy.
Mr Singh said all the grass roots Labour organisations have been trying to prise firmer outlines on how, when and where each candidate would make spending cuts the current coalition government is carrying out.
With tonight's programme set to focus on the economy, Channel 4 News takes a look ahead at the potential leaders' economic stance.
DAVID MILIBAND
David Miliband previously told Channel 4 News the Conservative policy of cuts is "one which threatens our economy as well as the fairness of our society".
"It will have economic effects as well as social effects and it's very important that we are able to tackle the new government for the damage they are doing to our economy, not just the damage that they are doing to fairness in our society."
He has defended Labour's record on the economy, and argues that we should stick to Labour’s plan of halving the deficit in four years.
He has said: "The truth of the matter is that there was a global recession made in Wall Street not a British recession made in Downing Street and it's very important that we fight that misrepresentation of the actual truth of the matter."
However, he did concede that "while I think people thought that in administrative terms that the way in which we protected their savings, the way in which Gordon and Alistair prevented a slide into depression was probably right, they wanted more about where we were going to move into the future, and that was where the clarity of the offer suffered."
ED MILIBAND
Ed Miliband agrees that the deficit plan set out by the Labour government should be the starting point, but he argues more can be done through taxation – through a higher bank levy for example.
"I'm proud of our record but I think that you don't lose elections because you do everything right," he says. "You do lose elections because you make mistakes," he told Channel 4 News last month.
"When I think about the economy I think we left too many people struggling on low wages, which is why I feel we've got to transform our economy. We can't just be the people who celebrate the flexible labour market when it means worse terms and conditions for people.
"I think markets are too dominant in our society, we work the longest hours in Western Europe, our kids are bombarded by childhood advertising, our town centres and city centres are often taken over against the wishes of local people by the kind of places they don't want to be there - we've go to change that."
With the support of the biggest unions he is certainly the candidate with the biggest public backing so far. The candidate says that he aims to stay true to his trade union supporters and will work to improve their lives up and down the country. But, he says, industrial action is not always the key.
Would he be opposing all the cuts the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats are proposing now? "No," he says, although he warns that the "British people will face the consequences" of the coalition cutting too soon and too deep.
"You already see some warning signals in our economy," he says, adding that the poorest in society will be affected the most by "cavalier" cuts.
ED BALLS
Ed Balls is arguing for the most controversial economic policy: to slow down the reduction of the deficit to a pace below the one Labour argued for at the last election.
Mr Balls is the one candidate who will be more than happy to debate the economy live on television, Mr Ferguson told Channel 4 News.
That said, set to finish joint-last, "he's probably too far behind" to gain enough votes to push him to the front, he said.
Mr Singh said Mr Balls is positioning himself for the shadow chancellor's job, by running his campaign as he always does "showing the Milibands he is a force to be reckoned with".
Balls rejects the suggestion that Labour's failure to spell out how it would shore up the country's finances lost it the election, saying that the David Cameron's poll rating fell in the run-up to the election while the Conservatives attacked Labour on the economy.
"Labour needs to set out very clearly that there is an alternative, that the arguments being put by David Cameron and George Osborne are very reminiscent not just of Margaret Thatcher and Geoffrey Howe in 1980 but also Ramsay MacDonald and Philip Snowden in 1931," he said.
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"Both times where following a financial crunch and a recession, governments cut public spending hard to try to get the deficit down and it resulted in public finances getting worse, unemployment being high for a long time."
But if Balls loses the leadership election, doesn't his insistence on such a softly-softly approach to deficit-cutting put him at odds with his rivals, and effectively rule him out of a second-prize job as shadow chancellor?
"One of the central questions of this few years is about how we deal with the deficit and whether we do so in a way that damages growth and jobs and our public services or supports them," he said.
"I think that is a central question and that is why I've been very clear we have to set out an economic alternative."
DIANE ABBOTT
Diane Abbott is a real outsider, said Mr Singh.
"She is the Sarah Palin of the competition," he added.
She however, sees herself as more than the token candidate of the left and argues that like the government she would want to cut the deficit over the course of this parliament.
However, she told the FT: "The government's cuts will actually widen the deficit because they will take demand out of the economy. The investment that I would promote would create jobs and promote real deficit reduction."
While she insists that "nobody campaigns for higher taxes" she does criticise the coalition government's plan to cut the public deficit with 80 per cent spending cuts and 20 per cent tax rises as "an unreasonable split".
"I think one of the problems with New Labour and its spin and the mentality it encouraged was this idea that taxation has some moral content - high taxation is bad, low taxation is good. Taxation is a mechanism.
"Public sector cuts hit ordinary people twice. You lose your services and you lose your jobs, particularly in the North and Scotland, and London and the South East where the public sector is a huge employer.
"On top of that there are 1.2 million jobs in the private sector tied to public sector spending. So in terms of growth I think it's a big mistake to cut public spending as hard as that. And yes, I would raise more money from taxation."
She insists that tax rises would not affect ordinary people, but instead bank taxes should be increased, a financial transactions tax should be introduced and the 50p tax rate (for those earning over £150,000) should be made permanent.
Ms Abbott homes in on defence as one area where cuts should be made, talking about scrapping the Trident nuclear deterrent system and two aircraft carriers planned by the navy. But she does says that Britain should still have a central role in the world.
ANDY BURNHAM
Andy Burnham told Channel 4 News previously: "Job number one is to set out a clear and principled alternative to the course upon which the coalition have placed us.
"Labour must, at the time of the spending review if not before, set out a moral alternative to cuts on the scale that we are about to see. I think we're going to see such damage to public services that in some cases it could be irreparable.
He gives the example of social care: "Services are already pretty stretched around the country. To put 40 per cent cuts on care services at a time when the demographic pressure increases year on year - I don't know what service you'd have left. You would have practically nothing beyond an emergency service for those with critical needs.
The NHS is Mr Burnham's hot topic, and one on which he could win votes, said Mr Ferguson. However, like Abbott, he fears Mr Burnham is too far behind to garner the support needed. Mr Singh also pointed out that while David Miliband's campaign website went live a year ago, Mr Burnham's campaign has been too little, too late – run out of his family home and sadly coinciding with his wife falling ill.
Mr Burnham says that Labour will have to take "head on" the argument that they "left a huge mess".
"We both need to defend what we did, which I believe we can, and we then must also set out an alternative course for where we find ourselves," he says.
"As chief secretary to the treasury, I can remember very well the last spending review and Gordon, very wisely in my view, decided at that time that he would grow public spending below overall growth in the economy. And I can remember the difficult discussions with cabinet colleagues at that time because everybody said 'well why are we doing this'.
"With hindsight it obviously was a very wise decision indeed. "The coalition have gone for 80/20 in terms of spending cuts to tax increases. We should, in my view, be looking for something much more like 60/40. And it would be 60/40 of a less speedy reduction.
"I've also made the quite difficult suggestion for the shadow health secretary to make that it is not sustainable to give the National Health Service real-terms increases in this period as the coalition propose.
"I believe the right thing to do is, as Labour proposed in the election, to give inflation and then have a more balanced approach to public spending so that we don't have huge cuts for councils, police and schools. But that's where we're currently heading at the moment."
For Burnham, Labour's problem at the last election was that "we lost that sense that we were on the side of people working hard."
"There was a sense that we were, particularly post recession, that we were perhaps on the side of big business, not on the side of ordinary people," he said.
He says that Gordon Brown and Alistair Darling did take the right steps in tackling the recession, but says: "I was struck at that time how we struggled to communicate that, and the public thought we were helping bankers and the banking industry, not ordinary people."
