The former Labour spin doctor Alastair Campbell has hit out at the state of the party after this week’s local elections.
Tony Blair’s former adviser said in a speech that “huge swathes of the country” could not accept the current party in power.
“If we cannot beat this shambles of a Tory party, we don’t deserve to be in the game,” he told the centre-left pressure group Progress.
Defending his comments on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme he hit out at the Momentum movement, which backs Jeremy Corbyn, for celebrating results that suggested neither Labour nor the Tories could break the electoral deadlock that delivered a hung parliament last June.
“We are really clutching at straws,” he said. “If I see one more person from the Momentum side saying: ‘These are the best results since 1971’. What planet are they on? These are bad results.
“You’re talking here about the government, which is possibly the worst government in living memory. You’ve had Windrush, you’ve had Grenfell, you’ve had the Brexit negotiations going from bad to worse, you’ve had the National Health Service under more pressure than it’s been for a long, long time, serial incompetence day after day after day, yet the public do not seem in nearly sufficient numbers remotely interested in supporting the Labour party.”
Campbell, who backs a referendum on the terms of the Brexit deal, said Labour should not be seen as supporting Theresa May’s plans for leaving the EU.
Referencing a Blair-era soundbite, Campbell said Labour should be “tough on Brexit, tough on the causes of Brexit”, fighting against the UK’s departure from the EU while addressing the concerns of those who voted to leave.
He said that if Labour’s Brexit tests were to mean anything the party could not support May’s strategy. “If they do, then though the Tories will be seen as Brexit’s architect, Labour will be its bricklayer, and history is harsh when the house comes tumbling down,” he said.
“My Labour tribalism is being pushed to the limit by the return of militant-style nastiness in local politics, by my revulsion that any antisemitism has been allowed to fester, by the feeling that some in the leadership and their supporters feel much greater animus against other Labour supporters than against Tories.”
