Angela Rayner has issued a sobering assessment of Sir Keir Starmer’s Labour government after the party’s historic defeat at the local elections, as she called on the PM to make a change in direction.
Amid speculation she is one of the candidates to replace Sir Keir, who is facing a threat of a leadership challenge from one of his own MPs, Ms Rayner has issued a statement in which she attacks the progress of the party.
Ms Rayner, who resigned as deputy prime minister last year, said the party now faced “may be our last chance” to change ahead of Sir Keir’s expected speech on Monday.
She also called the blocking of Andy Burnham to be a Labour candiate at the Gorton and Denton by-election a “mistake”.
Here is her statement in full:
Our party has suffered a historic defeat. Many good Labour colleagues have lost their seats despite working hard for those they represented. We have lost good Labour administrations and lost the chance for more.
What we are doing isn’t working, and it needs to change. This may be our last chance.
The Labour Party must now live up to our name: we must be the party of working people. We’ve heard the same on the doorstep as we’ve seen in the polls – the cost of living is the top issue for voters of all parties. People have turned to populists and nationalists because we have not done enough to fix it.
Living standards are barely higher than they were a decade and a half ago. People feel hopeless – that the cost of living crisis will never end, and now they see oil and gas companies use global instability to post record profits.
Once again, ordinary people are paying the price for decisions they didn’t make. It’s no wonder that across the UK, working people feel the system is rigged against them.
Things can be so much better than this. Countries including Spain and Canada have shown that economies can grow and people can thrive when governments stay true to labour and social democratic values and put people first. We need to learn from that.In London, we lost young people who fear they will never afford a home. In my patch and across the north, we lost working people whose wages are too low and costs too high. In Scotland and Wales, people do not currently see Labour as the answer.
We are in danger of becoming a party of the well-off, not working people. The Peter Mandelson scandal showed a toxic culture of cronyism. Decisions like cutting winter fuel allowance just weren’t what people expected from a Labour government.
For too long, successive governments have allowed wealth and power to concentrate at the top without a plan to ensure the benefits of economic growth are shared fairly. The result is an economy that does not work for the majority, with wealth concentrated in too few hands. This level of inequality, alongside squeezed living standards, is the outcome of a model built on deregulation, privatisation, and trickle-down economics.
But we have the chance to fix this.
We need immediate action to cut costs for households and put money back into the everyday economy. This can be done within the current fiscal rules, by ensuring those who benefit from the crisis contribute more so that everyone can thrive.
Our Employment Rights Act was just the first step in our plan to Make Work Pay. Now is the time to take the next steps, starting with a Fair Pay Agreement in social care – but not ending there. A rising minimum wage must go alongside our programme to get young people into work.
The investment we secured in social and affordable housing should now unleash a building boom that benefits British business and workers. We must double down on renters’ reform and show leaseholders our action on tackling ground rents and charges was just a first step to ending freehold for good.
Our devolution revolution has begun, but is nowhere near done.Giving mayors powers to transform planning and licensing can boost local business and good growth, in the interests of local people. They must go alongside economic powers and public services.Boosting community ownership and stopping the sell-off of local assets from pubs to playgrounds will put power back in local hands, helping restore the pride they feel in the places they live.
We must go further on planning reforms, to build the schools, hospitals, roads and infrastructure the country needs to grow.
We should be unafraid to promote new forms of public, community and cooperative ownership across the board. Buses and trains being brought back into public hands can now operate for the public good, at prices passengers can afford.
Thames Water is an iconic failure of privatisation, which resonates for the same reasons. People are rightly sick of bonuses for bosses who deliver nothing but higher bills. We must face down demands that the public pay the price of private failure.
We must create good jobs that pay decent wages by ensuring defence investment includes a secure manufacturing base. Use our house building programme to boost construction, invest in the green economy, backing SMEs by reforming business rates and increasing support to revive our high streets and local economies, raise the minimum wage and get young people into work.
And then there is politics itself, putting power back into people’s hands so that they are shaping the decisions that impact them. We must tackle the inflow of dodgy money in our politics – something that Nigel Farage, who took 5 million pounds in a secret personal gift from an offshore crypto baron, will never do. We must make politics work for ordinary people.We can only prove we mean it by putting the common interest ahead of factionalism.
This is bigger than personalities, but it is time to acknowledge that blocking Andy Burnham was a mistake. We must show we understand the scale of change the moment calls for – that means bringing our best players into Parliament – and embracing the type of agenda that has been successful at a local level, rather than reaching back to an agenda and politics that has failed people.
These are the fights we need to have, and the change in direction we need to see. Policy tweaks will not fix the fundamental challenges facing our country. This government needs, at pace, to put measures in place that make people’s lives tangibly better, while fixing the foundations of a system rigged against them.
The Prime Minister must now meet the moment and set out the change our country needs.
Change our economic agenda to prioritise making people better off, change how we run our party so that all voices are listened to, and change how we do politics.
Labour exists to make working people better off. That is not happening fast enough, and it needs to change — now.
