Leadership candidate criticises Ed Miliband’s policies such as freezing energy prices and says she would back free schools that deliver

Labour leadership candidate Liz Kendall has warned the party not to cling to the “fantasy” that Britain has swung to the left, as she backed successful free schools and pledged to fight defence cuts.

Kendall, who is now the bookies’ second favourite to win behind Andy Burnham, ditched a number of the former Labour leader Ed Miliband’s policies at a lunch with journalists in Westminster on Thursday.

In a speech and Q&A session, Kendall did not hold back in criticising the party’s position going into the general election earlier this month.

Referring to the senior Labour MP Ed Balls losing his seat of Morley and Outwood, she said: “We lost our shadow chancellor ... but most people thought we had lost our balls before the election.”

The MP for Leicester West has previously made it clear that she would reverse Miliband’s opposition to holding an EU referendum and disagreed with his claims that Labour did not overspend the last time it was in power.

In a further distancing from his policies, Kendall said Miliband’s energy price freeze had not been believable, that she would not prioritise cutting tuition fees and the party should back any successful school, regardless of its structure.

She also argued the contest “cannot be about who the general secretaries say impresses them the most”, following reports that the trade unions have been pressurising Labour MPs to back Burnham.

There is a possibility Burnham and the other leading candidate, Yvette Cooper, may get so many nominations from Labour MPs that Kendall fails to achieve the support of 15% of the parliamentary party and does not make it on to the ballot. Those who reach the shortlist are then put to a vote of Labour supporters.

Kendall described the party’s losses as epic and warned Labour that it does not “have a god-given right to exist”, so will have to win people’s trust back.



Her key argument was that Labour deluded itself about the country having shifted to the left.

She said: “We decided the British public had shifted to the left because we wished it to be so. We rarely said what was good about our last government and never dealt with the central case of our opponents about where we really fell short.

“We didn’t have answers to the big questions that people were asking about jobs, immigration and public finances. Lots of people told me they couldn’t see Ed as prime minister. But we didn’t lose because of his personality. We lost because of our politics.”

Kendall rejected the idea that she should be labelled a Blairite but accepted that she would like to be known as a modernising candidate.

She said she was firmly on the side of wealth creation and public service reform, as well as making clear that she would like the government to stick to the Nato target of spending 2% of national income on defence regardless of the cuts that this could entail elsewhere.

“When it comes to public services, I am firmly on the side of the public,” Kendall said. “Services should revolve around those who use them and be fit for the future, not stuck in the past. There is no point saying you believe in economic responsbility and being careful with taxpayers money if public services are a reform-free zone.”

She said Labour needed to apply its values to how the world is now, not how the party wants the world to be.

Kendall said: “When Labour loses we do one of three things. We decide we didn’t win because we weren’t leftwing enough: fantasy. We decide we can avoid the really tough decisions because they are too uncomfortable: a fudge. Or we decide that winning is too important.”

She said she thought it was an interesting idea that whoever wins the leadership contest should face a second test two years before the next election.