A day in the race: July 1st

By Mark Ferguson / @markfergusonuk

Another busy day in the leadership contest today. David Miliband told William Hague off, Ed Balls travelled to Cardiff, but Diane Abbott said no to a trip to Brussels. Tonight the candidates face off at the new MPs hustings – an environment that may benefit the two Miliband brothers, who gathered most of the support from the new MPs’ grouping.

DAVID MILIBAND had another busy day on the campaign trail today. This morning the New Statesman published an article David has written on the need for Labour to embrace Englishness. In it he said:

“If Labour is to avoid becoming a regional or sectional party, we need to confront the task of winning back our support among working-class and middle-income voters across England.”

This afternoon, Miliband attacked William Hague, saying that he needed to “behave like a foreign secretaryâ€. Speaking to Sky News he said:

“The message to William Hague is very simple: you don’t have to play politics any more. You’re the foreign secretary now. Behave like the foreign secretary.”

“William Hague built up a reputation as being very good at parliamentary jokes and very good at after dinner speeches. He’s now got a serious job to do and I think it’s very important that he just focuses on his job. Foreign policy isn’t about trying to take some silly hits at a previous administration.”

Later David was out campaigning in Rainworth ward with candidate Linda Tift, where he recorded the following audioboo:

ANDY BURNHAM today properly launched the “Save our Services†campaign that we had seen unveiled (perhaps mistakenly) by RSS feed earlier this week. In an email to a supporters’ list, Burnham said:

“Today I am launching a campaign to Save Our Services – the public services, delivered by councils across the country, that support older and vulnerable people and which are facing Coalition cuts of 25%.â€

However the text on his own website is much more forceful, and echoes an attack line against Nick Clegg first used by David Miliband — that Clegg is a “nodding dogâ€, saying:

“George Osborne and his Lib Dem nodding dogs, Nick Clegg and Danny Alexander, have pledged to slash our public services by a quarter. This will mean local care services for older and disabled people and supporting the most vulnerable, run by councils across the country, will be decimated. These swingeing cuts will pile more pressure onto the NHS as it struggles to discharge patients back to their homes and communities without the necessary local support services”

“This is public service vandalism and we must oppose these ConDem attacks on these vital local care services that so many of our friends and family rely on. I will oppose them by offering credible alternatives to reducing the deficit. Let’s be clear, the National Insurance rise that we planned should go ahead and we should stick to our manifesto commitment to protect the NHS budget in real terms, not increase it every year just for political expediency.â€

ED MILIBAND today contacted supporters to follow up on the themes raised by his speech on Tuesday. In an email entitled “A new social democracy†Ed said:

“Under my leadership, we will move on from the New Labour orthodoxy of using the state merely to correct for the gross inequalities and injustices of the market, to an approach that better avoids them in the first place — through industrial policy, through a changed approach to regulation and through social and financial responsibility at the very top of society.”

“In becoming that party and that country — one with compassion and creativity, as well as energy and enterprise — we need to develop an economy which offers the opportunity for people to become entrepreneurs, but one which also provides them with greater control over both their working lives and their family lives. That’s why I am proposing a universal right to request flexible working.”

Miliband also appeared on the Jeremy Vine show this afternoon on Radio 2.

According to the Next Left blog, DIANE ABBOTT has taken the unusual step of turning down the opportunity to visit Brussels and speak with Labour MEPs. All of the other Labour candidates have already taken the short train journey to the Belgian capital, and as MEPs votes carry the same weight as Westminster MPS, it seems strange for Abbott not to take the opportunity to collect some much needed support in the MPs’ section.

Abbott says that she is too busy campaigning for the leadership to head over to Brussels — yet the other candidates, most of whom appear to have busier campaign schedules, have taken the time to make the journey. It could be that the Abbott campaign is short of money and can’t justify the expense of travelling to Belgium for a small number of votes. But they can’t be that short, can they?

ED BALLS had a quiet day today by his usually hectic campaigning standards. Recently he has been so ever present in the media that even not especially Labour members of my family have begun to comment on it. By that small and anecdotal measure the Balls campaign is breaking through. Today he was in Cardiff, visiting the Welsh Assembly, Plas Bryn extraCare housing scheme and Plasmawr Welsh medium school.