Peter’s intervention has served to highlight the big choice facing the Labour Party

By Sadiq Khan MP / @SadiqKhan

Let me say first of all that Peter Mandelson worked tirelessly in the general election, and was a big part of our success in government, on and off, over the past 13 years. We should not let any honest disagreements that we have over this leadership election cloud his important place in Labour’s history.

Peter’s intervention has served to highlight the big choice facing the Labour Party in this leadership contest – change versus a return to the New Labour of the past.

It is precisely because Peter Mandelson led our last general election campaign that I am surprised that he doesn’t see that we must change to win again.

To me, this is a simple equation: if we refuse to change, and insist that we were right on everything and the electorate were wrong to reject Labour at the last election, then how can we expect to bring back the 5 million “lost voters” who left Labour since 1997?

Peter falls into the trap of misunderstanding Ed Miliband’s position and makes an unfair caricature of Ed’s campaign by saying that he is dumping on our record in government or appealing only to Labour’s so-called “core vote”.

What we achieved in government, we should be very proud of, but what Ed rightly says is that we lost our radicalism on some issues and were too afraid of the ghosts of our past, so took the wrong course on some other issues. If we don’t own up to where we didn’t get it right, then surely we stand no chance of putting back together the winning coalition that we need, in order to kick out the ConDem coalition.

Ed has made clear that to win again, we need to appeal across the board to the voters who left us – middle class and working class voters, people who left us for the Lib Dems and people who deserted us for the Tories.

That means recognising that we need to change on a broad range of policies, like ID cards and tuition fees. That means recognising that we didn’t do enough to lift people out of low pay and it means taking bold action to lift wages by introducing tax breaks for companies who pay a living wage. It means recognising that one more heave with the same New Labour playbook won’t win us the election next time round.

Peter will always have a special place in the history of New Labour, but he has recognised more than anyone in our recent past when the party has to move on in order to win again. Peter was right that the party had to modernise in the 1990s, but he is now on the wrong side of history in a way that he would never have imagined in 1994.

This isn’t 1994 – it is 2010, but Ed Miliband is right and Peter is wrong: now is the time for change, not retrenchment.

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