Starting gun fires on Labour leadership contest as candidates set out their stall

Inevitably, the Sunday papers are full of pieces by Labour leadership hopefuls dissecting why their party did so badly and offering their initial prescriptions. They are actually all rather slow out of the blocks as David Lammy said this morning that ‘certainly for people like me it’s absolutely time to step up into a leadership role’.

So in the Observer we have Chuka Umunna, positioning himself, unsurprisingly, as the Blairite candidate. He says the party had ‘too little to say to the majority of people in the middle’ and that ‘we need a different, big-tent approach’ (referencing the master). He also says:

– Labour didn’t engage effectively with fears that it was a spendthrift party and left it too late to ‘sufficiently illustrate that we took deficit reduction seriously’.

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– The party should have emphasised the importance of an efficient public sector and decentralising the state.