Former Health Secretary Alan Milburn Speaks to T&G on Reforming the Labour Party and More

Former Labour Health Secretary Alan Milburn has told Times Radio the Labour Party is in "deep crisis".

Speaking to Tom Newton Dunn and Isabel Hardman on T&G on Sunday (from 10am this morning) he said:

We are in deep crisis. I don't think we've ever really understood fully or gone through a process to understand fully why it is that we have been losing successive elections. My good friend Peter Mandelson was right about the lose, lose, lose, Blair, Blair, Blair thing . And this is really not an argument, by the way, for a return to 1997. The world is a very, very different world and we need to have different perspectives. But it would be important if you keep losing to understand why. And I would say what Keir should really do this week is set out a three stage process for that. One, he should be clear that we're going to engage in a process with the public, with the electorate, of course with the party but primarily with the public to try to understand and engage with them about why they're not voting Labour. And that's something that we've never done. Secondly, you need, therefore, a full scale policy review which Anneliese (Dodds) is leading but it needs to be grounded in what people are saying about us and not just what we're saying about ourselves. And then thirdly, we've got to reinvent the Labour Party.

And he says Sir Keir Starmer needs to move more quickly to change the party:

I think he's credible, he's competent. He's shown courage over issues like anti semitism and Jeremy Corbyn and that's great. But compared to the scale of the task, honestly, the pace of reform is just too slow.

We've got to be the party of change and the party of reform because that's the only time that Labour ever wins. If you're the party of the status quo...you never win. I think his pamphlet that he published last week, that's a step in the right direction. It's a step towards that but boy, oh, boy, he has to up the pace.

What people are struggling with is to answer the question; "what are you for?" Political parties don't have a God given right to exist. Unless they can answer the fundamental question about what you're for (then) you've got a fundamental problem of public legitimacy.

On the red wall and his former seat turning blue:

Labour somehow or other failed to get, tonally, the conversation right with people in these areas. And almost in our desire to sort of move on, we almost neglected the pride that people have in those places. And that is something that we've got to recapture

And on whether Boris Johnson's "stardust" can be overcome:

A bit of stardust helps. If we're honest about it Mr. Johnson has some of that. He has the ability to connect with the British public in a way that the centre left finds mystifying but there's something there, we've got to acknowledge that. The only thing I would say about this is that in a world that looks pretty confusing, where there's rampant insecurity about the planet, about the next generation, about the future of work, it may well be that steady competence and credibility has more purchase than pure stardust.

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