Alexander identifies Labour’s problem

Douglas Alexander may sometimes hide the meaning of what he says under a layer of jargon but he remains one of the more interesting political strategists on the Labour side. Alexander, a Brown long-marcher turned Blairite, saw before many of his colleagues the need for Labour to level with the public on cuts. He privately thought that Gordon Brown’s attempt to fight the last election on a reprise of the investment versus cuts strategy of ’01 and ’05 was a mistake.

So, it is no surprise that Alexander, now shadow Foreign Secretary, is trying to use the opportunity created by Ed Balls’ acceptance of the need for a public sector pay freeze to try and move Labour into a better fiscal place. Strikingly, though, he accepts that at the moment Labour’s economic credibility is so shot that bad economic news doesn’t drive the voters towards the party. He tells Patrick Wintour that, ‘At the time of the Autumn statement we saw that economic failure for the Tories did not translate into political success for us.