Brown’s PPS says new leader must be untainted by past mistakes

By Alex Smith / @alexsmith1982

As Gordon Brown’s former Parliamentary Private Secretary, John Trickett has good insight into where the party leadership has operated well and less well in recent years.

In the Guardian yesterday evening, Trickert wrote about how Labour must now cease to be part of the perceived establishment, and instead be on the side of the governed, supporting people at a time of uncertainty, and acknowledging and learning from past mistakes:

Tricket writes:

“With the Lib Dems now camped out with the Conservatives in a coalition dominated by the right, and a cabinet stuffed with millionaires apparently preparing to cut public services, a new political vacuum has opened up for Labour if it has the courage to occupy the centre left of British politics.

Without being seen to look backward to old Labour formulae, we can and should put an end to the years of triangulation against the Tories. We must cease to be the party of the establishment, and become the party of an insurgency against those powerful vested interests which have so damaged the country.”

He continues:

“Labour needs to rebuild its relationship with its core demographic alliance of progressive and working-class voters. Our social base in both these groups has atrophied. Between 1997 and 2005, and under Tony Blair, Labour lost four million votes. In last week’s election we lost a further 900,000, almost exclusively manual workers…

“In order to resolve the political crisis, we should place ourselves decisively on the side of the governed and not be part of the elite. We need to return to our tradition of being for civil liberties and opposed to the authoritarian state. We need to embrace political and institutional reform. It will also mean that our new leader must say that the war in Iraq was wrong and that the mistake will never again be repeated by Labour.”

Read the full article here.

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