Starmer implicitly criticises Labour leadership for sidelining him during election campaign – live news
Rolling coverage of the day’s political developments as they happen, including Tony Blair’s speech on the lessons from Labour’s defeat.
Sally Gimson, who was selected and then deselected as Labour’s candidate for Bassetlaw in the election, has strongly rejected John Mann’s claim that Sir Keir Starmer did not support her. (See 11.10am.) She is backing Starmer for leader.
John – this is totally unfair and untrue. Keir did stand up for me, and did all he could to help me behind the scenes, and gave me his support publicly. I back him whole heartedly and think he will be a brilliant leader. Please stop making these accusations
And here are the main points from Yvette Cooper’s interview on the Today programme this morning. Cooper, a former cabinet minister and chair of the home affairs committee in the last parliament, was a candidate for the leadership in 2015, when she came third behind Jeremy Corbyn and Andy Burnham.
I think we clearly do have to change because it hasn’t worked, and we’ve got the fewest Labour MPs since 1935 and a big drop in working-class support with low-income voters choosing the Conservatives even though they didn’t want to, and people felt let down by the choice that we give them, so we have to show some humility, because we got things wrong.
We cannot just become a party that is concentrated in cities with our support increasingly concentrated in diverse young fast-moving areas while older voters in towns think we aren’t listening to them.
Across the country, over half of Labour’s existing MPs represent cities with over 250,000 inhabitants – 49 are from London and 55 from 16 cities outside the capital. By contrast, among the 123 target seats [that Labour needs to win to gain a majority at the next election[ only 19 are in cites with a population of over 250,000 while 104 represent towns and smaller communities. This could pose a significant challenge to the party in rebuilding in the areas it needs to target, as existing MPs will naturally channel the perspectives of their urban constituents.
5. 63pc of the seats Labour needs to win are in the north, the midlands and Wales; 13pc are in Scotland; and 24pc are in southern England.
6. 104 of the 123 seats Labour needs to win are in towns not cities (over half of existing Labour seats are in cities). pic.twitter.com/5pClmcUlos
And that is not a left/right issue, and this is where both the Jeremy Corbyn and Tony Blair challenge comes in, because both the left and the right of our party are seen as internationalist, not patriotic, at the moment.
And that might not be fair, but it is how they are seen. Both Jeremy Corbyn and Tony Blair are seen as internationalist, not patriots, and we should be able to be both patriotic and outward looking because that’s what we were in 1945.
The contest doesn’t start until January, and I’ll decide over Christmas what I’m going to do, because we’ve just obviously had a hard local campaign. As you know, I’ve stood before, but obviously the party membership has changed a lot. There’s a lot of things to reflect on … I’m going to reflect over Christmas.
There are some great things in our manifesto, like the green new deal, the national education service. Wonderful radical things that we have to fight for. But we’ve also got to be credible in delivering them and be focused and get a grip.
We have to sort out the problems in our party, that includes kicking out the vile anti-Semitism in our party, but it’s also about a broader thing, about restoring kindness to politics, being more inclusive and challenging some of the abuse in politics that we have seen from all sides and we certainly should not have in the Labour party.