Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Not all the worriers in Labour are from a previous ‘era’

The papers are full of Blairite warnings to Ed Miliband and Andy Burnham about the way Labour is campaigning on the NHS at present. Alan Milburn’s World at One interview gets a great deal of coverage, and just to twist the knife a bit further, the former Cabinet minister joins John Hutton to write in the FT that ‘if Labour is to win in May, the two Eds need to set the record straight and reclaim ground foolishly bequeathed to their opponents’. They’re talking about the economy, criticising the current Labour leadership for apologising too much for New Labour’s spending when the Tories supported it (a pithy line in the piece is ‘Mr Osborne cannot have been unduly concerned about Labour spending plans when in 2007, he committed the Tories to sticking to them’).

But though this gets plenty of attention in the media, the question is whether the increasingly public agitation of the Blairites will be given much attention by the Leader’s office.

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