Beleagured Brown facing struggle to stay in power
GORDON Brown's government was thrown into crisis today as Labour's own vice chairman demanded he step down immediately.
Joan Ryan, a former minister, asked for leadership nomination forms to be issued prior to the Labour conference in Manchester next week.
It follows last night's revelation that Siobhain McDonagh, a senior Government whip who hadn't crossed the leadership in 11 years, wanted Mr Brown out. She was sacked within hours.
Ms McDonagh was one of a number of usually-loyal MPs who are urging the party to issue leadership nomination forms ahead of Labour’s annual conference, which starts in Manchester next weekend.
She claimed a “huge number” of her fellow Labour MPs shared her desire for a contest.
But Ms Ryan stepped up the pressure on Mr Brown by saying that a leadership contest was essential to meeting the needs of the country.
“I think we need to have a leadership election to trigger a deep and far-reaching debate and those people in our party who have something to offer and are capable of leadership need to put themselves forward,” she said.
“We need a multiplicity of candidates. That’s a healthy thing to do and that’s part of the democracy of our party. It’s happening anyway, as I say, but it’s happening behind closed doors.”
Her comments came as a string of senior Labour MPs - including former health secretary Patricia Hewitt - called Mr Brown’s strategy into question and urged him to come up with a “convincing new narrative”.
Six former ministers were among 12 MPs to complain in an article for Progress magazine that that the Government had failed to show how it would get through the economic turmoil.
Labour officials claim that fewer than 10 MPs have requested nomination papers to be sent out, although reports suggest that the figure may be slightly higher.
More names are expected to emerge over the coming days as part of what appears to be a co-ordinated move to destabilise Mr Brown.
If nomination papers were to be sent out, the rebels believe at least 71 would nominate somebody other than Mr Brown - the 20 per cent of Labour MPs needed to trigger an election.
But Tony Lloyd, the chairman of the Parliamentary Labour Party, said today he was not aware of any widespread support for the position of Ms Ryan and Ms McDonagh.
“What it does represent is a handful of people who are not joined by the overwhelming majority of Labour MPs,” he said.
Mr Lloyd also stressed how difficult it would be to actually trigger a leadership election.
“A stalking horse it does not seem as if there is, and don’t forget that it requires the threshold of 70 Labour MPs, and this handful of people who are coming out of the woodwork are not going to trigger a leadership contest,” he said.
Schools Secretary Ed Balls, a senior ally of the Prime Minister, also claimed today there was “very little chance” of Mr Brown being ousted before the next general election.
Other MPs who have requested nomination papers include former ministers George Howarth and, reportedly, Janet Anderson, Kate Hoey and Frank Field.
Backbenchers Jim Dowd and Graham Stringer are also said to have issued the request.
The involvement of Ms McDonagh, a minister who has a relatively safe seat and is not known for speaking out of turn, sent tremors through the party last night.
Her intervention also brought to an end a short period of relative security Mr Brown had enjoyed after summer speculation over his leadership has quietened down over the last couple of weeks.
The resulting frenzy looks set to overshadow a fightback by Mr Brown at Labour’s annual conference.
In the Progress article, the 12 MPs led by Ms Hewitt suggested that voters’ faith in the Government’s economic competence had been shaken by the recent turmoil.
The group said ministers had offered “no explanation” as to how they would navigate the economy through its present difficulties.
It also questioned the wisdom of Chancellor Alistair Darling’s £2.7 billion tax U-turn earlier this year.
“Labour needs to provide a convincing new narrative if left-of-centre politics are to remain the driving force in Britain,” they wrote.
“This has to be more than a series of policy initiatives. It has to set a new framework for post-credit crunch Britain.”
They said the party’s most urgent task was to “renew confidence in our economic competence”.
They described recent policies as being “defensive” when the party needed to be “bold”.
“Our most urgent task is to renew confidence in our economic competence so that people know that the country will come out of the current downturn with a resilient economy and a cohesive society,” they went on.
While Labour was “rightly” rejecting Tory solutions to previous recessions, they said, Labour had “no explanation yet as to how we are going to steer the economy through the troubled waters ahead”.
“Clamour is understandably growing for measures to help families under financial pressure from rising energy prices and heavy mortgage costs.
“But one-off taxes and payouts, no matter how justified in their own terms, do not amount to a strategy.”
The MPs called for better explanations of what the Government was going to do about “the things that affect people day to day: inflation and interest rates, household bills and mortgages”.
They said there was a “yawning chasm” to fill between the Scottish National Party’s “failures” on the left of the political spectrum and Conservative and Liberal Democrat positions on the right.
“Failure to do so would be a hammer blow, not only to the future of progressive politics, but also to our Government,” they concluded.
