Labour admits Cameron is a 'serious threat'

Labour admits David Cameron's Conservatives pose a threat

Monday, 25, Sep 2006 12:00

Labour MPs have this evening warned that David Cameron's newly-resurgent Conservatives pose a serious threat to their party.

"I think for the first time in 12 years we have got a seriously credible opposition with a leader that we have really got to take seriously," junior trade minister Margaret Hodge told a fringe meeting at the Labour party conference in Manchester.

Dudley MP Ian Austin added: "Politics has gotten interesting since David Cameron became Tory leader."

But health minister Andy Burnham claimed grassroots Conservatives were becoming "uncomfortable" with the direction Mr Cameron was taking the party in, and said Labour should exploit these differences.

At a meeting organised by the New Labour think tank, Progress, Ms Hodge warned delegates: "We may think here in the Labour party that he is a traditional public school toff…but people do like him."

The MP for Barking emphasised that Labour "must fight him from the left of centre ground…we need to constantly reassert our pre-eminent position and our control of that centre ground in politics".

"Our task is to define that centre ground in progressive terms," she said.

Mr Austin suggested the Tory leader was vulnerable because his party had failed to truly reform itself, stating: "I believe that [his policies] are the same old Conservative ideology of small state and spending cuts, leaving the most vulnerable to rely on charity."

Mr Burnham added: "We have got to get better as the Labour party at exploiting some of these differences, of peeling Cameron away from some of the hardcore, Thatcherite hard right that is still there in abundance in the parliamentary Conservative party.

"There are many of them and they do not think like David Cameron."

Speaking at a separate meeting, former foreign secretary Jack Straw argued that Mr Cameron had made blunders in foreign policy that Labour could exploit.

On a recent trip to the United States, he said he had noticed how American politicians were "wholly underwhelmed" by Mr Cameron's anti-American speech on this year's fifth anniversary of the September 11th attacks.

Mr Straw added that the Tory leader's foreign policy "is to detach ourselves from the US and insult the largest political party in the EU [the European People's party or EPP]. I do not think it is going to work."

At the same meeting, deputy Labour leadership candidate Harriet Harman warned: "We need a forensic critique of the Tories. We got out of the habit but the Tories are an electoral challenge again."