Everyone should get on with their jobs

By Jim Murphy MP

I’ve been out of the country for a week and have come back to another bout of Labour Party instability.

My advice to everyone involved in this week’s briefing and counter-briefing is just shut up and get on with your job.

Clearly Ed M has become the focus of a lot of this. People should get off his back. Last year’s leadership election has gone: it’s in the past. Even more so the Blair/Brown era – it is now being taught in the school curriculum as modern political history. And we won’t win next time by trashing what Tony in particular did last time. We win next time by exposing the damage this Tory Government is doing to Britain and showing, as Ed has rightly argued, that we must protect the British Promise to ensure the next generation does better than the last.

It is true that just a year after a catastrophically bad general election we all want to see Labour doing better than we are. We have a lot of hard work to do, but rather than publicly turning on ourselves again let’s get on and do the work. Labour has to offer a sense of our country’s future, do everything to remain credible on the deficit and collectively raise our game.

I said some months ago that one of our problems is that we are currently only the third most interesting political party in Britain. This is only the second weekend since our election defeat when we are the focus of the attention. When it happens for the third time let’s make sure it’s for reasons that are good for Labour.