Anger as Miliband joins panel to look into Labour election defeat
ED MILIBAND’S appointment to a panel which will analyse why Labour was so badly defeated in the 2019 General Election has angered some in the party.
The Doncaster North MP, who was Labour leader when the party lost the 2015 election, will hear evidence, along with other panel members, from every defeated Labour MP plus councillors, candidates and activists, to try and figure out exactly what went wrong earlier this month.
But The Times reported Mr Miliband had been accused of “breathtaking arrogance” over the move, and Lisa Nandy, the Labour MP for Wigan, who is tipped to run for the leader of the party, said the review was taking the “wrong approach”.
Ms Nandy said: “If the lesson is drawn from this election is, a review can be drawn up in a meeting room in Westminster, without any reference to the two parts
of the Labour movement – our councillor base and trade union base – that were probably the reason we didn’t have a worse result, I just don’t think that people are drawing the right lessons at all.
“We need to be out in places like Ashfield, listening to people like the ex-miner I met yesterday, not sitting in meeting rooms in Westminster trying to debate this out amongst ourselves with the help of a few think-tanks.”
One Shadow Minister told The Times: “The party simply doesn’t need a post-mortem carried out by a self-nominated group consisting of a failed leader and his chief of staff who themselves have not given an adequate explanatory account of their lost election in 2015.”
And Labour peer Lord Adonis added: “The funniest proposition since the election is that Ed Miliband should lead a review into why it was lost for Labour.”
Ben Bradshaw, the Labour MP for Exeter, said it may have been better for the review to involve someone with “experience of actually winning a General Election”.
Mr Miliband was contacted for comment.