LABOUR must come to terms with the "great" Tony Blair and his legacy before it can make progress, one of his former cabinet ministers has claimed.
Alan Milburn, who served as Health Secretary, launched the latest stinging attack on Ed Miliband, saying he was the wrong leader with the wrong approach.
Mr Milburn's broadside came as Jon Cruddas, Mr Milband's former policy co-ordinator, announced that an English Labour Party would be launched next month with the idea that it would be formally recognised in the same way the Scottish Labour Party was.
Speaking at an event organised by the IPPR think-tank, the MP for Dagenham said: "We are going to do it...It will be imminent," but then added it was "not something I should have said". He later noted that a meeting was to be held in July to launch a campaign for the new English Labour Party.
Labour backbencher Graham Allen made clear he "fully supports Jon Cruddas's call for distinct English, Scottish and Welsh Labour parties as part of a federal Labour party".
But Labour HQ swiftly made clear there were "no plans" to set up such a body and Ian Murray, the Shadow Scottish Secretary, cautioned against making "knee-jerk reactions" in the wake of the crushing General Election defeat.
Since that defeat, particularly bad in Scotland, senior figures have lined up to attack Mr Miliband's leadership, including his brother David, who argued the party had "turned the page backwards" under it.
Lord Mandelson, the former Business Secretary and one of the architects of New Labour, argued that Mr Miliband's left-wing, anti-business stance had left the party facing a crisis just as bad as the dark days of the 1980s when it was humiliated at the polls.
Asked what had been missing from Labour's pitch to the public, the peer replied disdainfully: "An economic policy."
In a speech to the Centre for Social Justice think-tank, Mr Milburn denounced Mr Miliband for rejecting New Labour's legacy, which had persuaded voters that Old Labour was back.
He declared: "We had the wrong leader and we had the wrong approach. Inevitably, we paid the price."
The social mobility tsar, who announced his support for moderniser Liz Kendall in the race to succeed Mr Miliband as leader, explained: "We decided to ditch rather than defend the Labour government's record, leaving our opponents with an open goal. There was no great appetite for the Conservatives in the country but we drove voters into their arms."
He argued great leaders always had a big purpose. "For Churchill it was victory in war, for Thatcher victory against a stifling state, for Blair it was victory against old-fashioned attitudes and institutions that held our country back."
The former Secretary of State claimed that voters were no longer sure what Labour was for. Yet, he argued, too many in Labour's ranks had "deliberately and destructively turned their backs on the formula that turned Labour into the dominant political force in British politics for a decade and a half". Such "foolish revisionism", he insisted, had not saved Labour but had sunk it.
Mr Milburn added: "You don't have to agree with my verdict but unless and until Labour comes to a reckoning with Tony Blair and his legacy we will never make progress."
Yet Mr Cruddas claimed the ex-PM had become a "pariah" and argued that calls for the party to come up with an aspirational offer were "shorthand in Labour for chasing more middle-class voters". Yet, he pointed out, three-quarters of the supporters the party had lost since 1997 were working-class.
Elsewhere, the Rail, Maritime and Transport Union as well as the Fire Brigades Union, both not affiliated to Labour, came out in support of left-winger Jeremy Corbyn in the leadership race.
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