David Miliband says Labour “has turned the page backwards” in critique of brother’s leadership
Labour has "turned the page backwards", David Miliband said last night, in his strongest critique yet of his brother's leadership of the party.
The former foreign secretary, who lost out on the Labour leadership to his brother Ed Miliband, claimed there was "a very clear reason" for Labour's electoral defeat. In an interview with CNN, he said:
What I think is important for all the candidates [vying to replace Ed Miliband] is to reflect on the very clear lessons of two devastating electoral defeats for the Labour party in the last five years, which have come for a very clear reason.
And the reason is that the public have concluded that instead of building on the strengths and remedying the weaknesses of the Blair years, the party has turned the page backwards rather than turning the page forwards.
In another interview with The Times , he avoided criticising his brother directly, saying the defeat was "doubly painful" for him, as "I don't want [Ed] to be hurt and I don't want him to be vilified".
Miliband, who now heads up the International Rescue Committee in New York, pointed to the fact that it has been 50 years since Labour won a majority without Tony Blair.
In order to tackle this, he said that it was the "responsibility of all the candidates to find again that combination of economic dynamism and social justice that define [Labour's] success of the 1990s and early 2000s".
Here's the full interview: