Balls: People said we weren’t on their side

By Alex Smith / @alexsmith1982

With Ed Miliband telling his CLP he would stand for the leadership tonight, the race for the leadership looks to be hotting up this weekend.

Ed Balls has given a frank assessment of the reasons Labour lost the election in an interview with the Guardian, in what is certain to be interpreted as preparing the ground for a leadership bid.

Balls says:

“We had people saying ‘we work hard, and pay our taxes, but there are people who live near us, and are not working, and get more, where is the fairness in that?’

“In marginal seats people have been saying ‘you have lost touch with us, you are not our side, you are not in it for us’ and we have to understand why they are saying that.”

Balls continues:

“If this election is seen through the prism of Labour internal politics – are you Blair, are you Brown, are you old and are you New Labour? – that would be a disaster for the party,” he says. “The prism we have to see this though is listening to people about what they are saying and what we have to do to get on your side.”

The Guardian reports:

“Balls reveals that he will discuss with his local party in Morley and Outwood this weekend whether to stand for the Labour leadership. But he already has a campaign team ready, including his former ministerial colleague Vernon Coaker, whose victory in Gedling showed that the Tories would struggle to win an overall parliamentary majority.

“Balls had an inkling during the election campaign that a vacancy might arise when Brown told him after the second television leaders’ debate that he would stand down, saying he recognised he was not able to convince the British people that he could deliver change. But he is keen to point out that he would not stand as the “Gordon candidate” because the party needs to move beyond the Blair-Brown era.”

Read the full interview on the Guardian website.