Labour needs to show more energy in setting out its vision for government if Ed Miliband is to become the next prime minister, one of the party’s rising stars has said.
Chuka Umunna, the shadow business secretary, insisted that the party could win a majority “if we make the right calls” and if it had a “hopeful, optimistic, aspirational story”.
In a separate interview, Mr Miliband admitted that his relationship with his brother, David, was still difficult following the 2010 Labour leadership contest.
“It’s hard, but yes. We talk quite a bit. About politics, about my mum, what’s going on with his kids and my kids . . . you know,” he said.
Mr Umunna, in an interview with Alastair Campbell, Tony Blair’s former spin doctor, said that “even more energy” was needed from across the party to win the election.
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Asked if Labour was going to secure a majority, he said: “We can. I don’t know if we will but we can, if we make the right calls, if we focus on people and their ambitions and not on the bubble at Westminster.
“We have to tell a hopeful, optimistic, aspirational story that relates to their lives.”
Mr Umunna, the MP for Streatham and the son of a Nigerian immigrant father, claimed to have “taken a lot of racial abuse and invective from Ukip activists” for speaking up on the benefits of immigration.
“People do have legitimate concerns about controls, integration, ensuring people do not exploit the system and contribute, we should address those concerns,” he said in the interview for the October edition of GQ. “But the NHS would collapse without immigrants. The Windrush, others who came here at our request, they helped rebuild our country after the war.”
Mr Umunna suggested that some of Labour’s difficulties originated with Gordon Brown. “I do think we need to talk more proudly about our record. We do need to explain and rebut this notion that we crashed the car,” he said.
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“My view is that the seeds were sown under the last government and Gordon — for whom I have a lot of respect — his refusal to use the word ‘cuts’ in trying to frame the economic debate as investment versus cuts gave the impression we didn’t understand that debt and deficit would have to be dealt with.”