Burnham: I love entrepreneurs as much as nurses!

Labour hopeful tries to court businesses

Andy Burnham will today seek to position himself as the ‘champion’ of wealth creation in a bid to challenge the view he is the unions’ candidate for the Labour leadership The Shadow Health Secretary, who is seen as the frontrunner in the race, will pledge: ‘In my Labour Party, the entrepreneur will be as much our hero as the nurse.’

He will say Labour should not have been running a deficit before the financial crisis hit, and will promise that as prime minister he would eliminate the deficit if the Tories fail.

Though the admission the party made a mistake is sure to raise eyebrows – Mr Burnham was Chief Secretary to the Treasury from 2007 and 2008, when the crisis hit.

The U-turn comes amid claims of jitters in the Burnham camp about how well Liz Kendall, the Blairite candidate, is doing in attracting support from MPs. The other major contender, yvette Cooper, will officially launch her leadership campaign this afternoon in her West yorkshire constituency of Castleford.

The Shadow Home Secretary will start with a breakfast seminar with entrepreneurs before kicking off a nationwide ‘listening tour’ to hear from Labour members, Labour voters and those who turned away from the party.

Mr Burnham’s campaign is suf- fering because of the impression that he is favoured by the unions – an accusation that dogged Ed Miliband’s failed leadership.

Len McCluskey, general secretary of the hard-left Unite union, has said Mr Burnham is the candidate who ‘impresses’ him most.

And in his pre-election comments Mr Burnham continually attacked ‘privatisation’ of the nHS under the Coalition. At the Labour conference he said he would put ‘people before profit’.

However, his revised stance on the party’s economic record is at odds with five years ago, when he stood as Labour leader the first time.

Then Mr Burnham told Channel 4 news that the party has to take ‘head on’ the argument that they ‘left a huge mess’.

‘We both need to defend what we did, which I believe we can, and we then must also set out an alternative course for where we find ourselves,’ he said. But speaking to an

‘It’s the same

old faces’

audience of business leaders at international auditors Ernst & young in central London today, he will seek to address Labour’s reputation on economic competence and commit to building the ‘ broadest possible alliance for change’.

Mr Burnham will say the party’s appeal was too narrow, adding: ‘It worries me that, in some people’s eyes, Labour has become associated with giving people who don’t want to help themselves an easy ride. That must change before we can win again.’

On the deficit, he will say: ‘If we are to win back trust we have to start by admitting that we should not have been running a significant deficit in the years before the crash.

‘We can’t go into the next election, as we did into the last, with business and the public unclear on how Labour will balance the books, or when we will do so.’

And he will admit Labour ‘got it wrong on business’ because the party ‘simply didn’t say enough that we value what you do – creating jobs and wealth’. Addressing claims he is