Voters say Ed Miliband is ‘a problem’, shadow minister warns

Ed Miliband is “a problem” that is stopping voters supporting Labour, a shadow Cabinet minister has said.

The senior figure condemned Labour’s failed plan for winning last week’s local government elections and called for the party’s communications strategy to be torn up.

The comments came as another senior MP, Frank Field, the former cabinet minister, warned that the rise of the UK Independence Party posed “a huge threat” to Labour and called on Mr Miliband to speak in a language ordinary voters understand.

Their interventions follow lacklustre results for Labour in the local elections. The party won 338 council seats in England but were expected to gain 500.

The Labour leader was personally bruised by the campaign, in which he was photographed struggling to eat a bacon sandwich and caught out on live local radio by is ignorance of the local Labour council leader.

On Friday, Ed Balls, the shadow chancellor, criticised the party’s results, while other shadow cabinet ministers suggested Labour should have performed far better in these mid-term elections if it was to be on course to win the general election next year.

By Saturday night, there were signs that Mr Miliband’s allies were beginning to attack his leadership.

“I don’t want to say it is completely about Ed Miliband but there people in the country who quite regularly say he is a problem,” a shadow Cabinet minister said.

“We have got good policies and we are not communicating them. I don’t think we had a plan for the election. It seemed to consist of putting Ed up day after day and every couple of days making a statement on a different subject. The whole communications process in the party has got to be shaken up.”

Meanwhile, Mr Field said Mr Miliband was facing “big questions” after the local election results.

The MP for Birkenhead and a former Labour Cabinet minister, said Labour had been “in denial” about immigration and the party leadership must focus on addressing voters’ fears “in the language they speak themselves”.

“Ukip poses a huge threat to us,” he said. “We have got quite a lot to do.

“The danger for Labour is that our supporters have been more affected by immigration than any other group in the country and we have been more silent.

“We ought to be thinking about what we learn from Ukip’s campaign. How we put issues that concern people in a language they speak themselves ought to be our major concern.”

He said the party must not “excuse” the failure to win more council seats.

“This result poses big questions for the Labour leadership as a whole. How could we as a party that is concerned with those who have least in our society, have exposed them to the greatest pressures through immigration?

“A lot of the party has been in denial over these issues and a lot of our voters have said right, we have now got a choice.

“People at the bottom now have got a spokesman who will speak for them. They don’t like what’s going on and they have chosen to say what they didn’t like, which they couldn’t do through the traditional parties. We have got the most mega lessons to learn.”

Mr Miliband said on Saturday night that he remained determined to attract voters “from every walk of life” as he sought to stem the flood of criticism.

The Labour leader is to confront the party’s most prominent failure by returning to the campaign trail next week in a key seat where it lost control of the council.

A surge of support for Ukip in the Essex town of Thurrock – which is second on Labour’s 2015 target list – saw it take two Labour and three Tory seats and leave no party in overall control of the authority.

Thurrock had been hailed by Mr Miliband when the party took power there last year as evidence that the Opposition was “winning back trust, gaining ground”.

Despite winning more than 300 extra seats in the elections, the party failed to make the sort of advance in some key areas seen as vital to securing an overall majority in the Commons next year.

A projection of national vote share on the basis of the local votes suggested Labour was on 31 per cent – just two ahead of the Conservatives.

But the Labour leader pointed to other areas where the party had performed strongly as evidence he could secure the keys to 10 Downing Street.

“The local elections show Labour can win because it is our party which is winning where it matters in dozens of our target seats for the next election,” he said.

“From Cambridge to Redbridge, from Crawley to Amber Valley, people are electing Labour councils to meet their desire for change.”

A new poll of marginal seats also gave Labour some encouragement, giving it a 12-point lead over the Tories – enough to oust 83 Tory MPs and produce a healthy majority at Westminster.

“For too long, millions of people have felt locked out of our economy or let down and ignored by politics.

Source: telegraph.co.uk