Alexander: We need to pull together
Douglas Alexander has called on Labour’s senior economic team to remain united.
New shadow chancellor Ed Balls is settling into his unexpected role after last week’s unexpected resignation from shadow chancellor Alan Johnson.
Ed [Balls] said in his first day in office that he accepts the position that Ed [Miliband] set out,” Mr Alexander, the new shadow foreign secretary, told BBC1’s The Andrew Marr Show.
“But he has also been very clear, and I genuinely agree with him, that George Osborne is making choices which will mean a longer dole queue and higher welfare bills. The price of George Osborne’s errors is going to be paid by families across the country.”
Mr Johnson was quickly replaced with Ed Balls on Thursday, whose bullish tone on economic issues during last summer’s leadership election led to him failing to get the job in the autumn.
Ed Miliband’s choice appeared to have been the wrong one after Mr Johnson repeatedly defied his leader on key issues, including on the suitability of a graduate tax as a solution to higher education funding and the appropriateness of a 50p rate for income tax.
Now Labour figures hope Mr Balls will prove less of a handful.
“What lessons do all of us in the new generation draw about the past? Certainly that the era of Blair and Brown is over, but certainly that era of division and of factionalism did the Labour party a lot of damage,” Mr Alexander added.
“The lessons I draw is we do need to be economically credible in order to be electorally viable. We do need to pull together as a team and we need to absolutely clear we’re appealing to broad support right across the United Kingdom.”
Mr Alexander said Labour had to “offer answers” as well as “express anger” at the coalition government’s spending cuts programme.
“We are determined to pull together, leave behind some of the problems of the past, and start anticipating what questions the public will be asking of us over the next three or five years,” he said.
