“Andy Burnham is not helping the cause, by bringing the focus onto leadership that’s not helpful at all..
‘Change will not happen overnight, we always said it’s not a one term fix’, says Labour MP Gurinder Singh Josan, as the party’s conference concludes in Liverpool, and the government is more focused than ever on renewing Britain.
Gurinder, the MP for Smethwick, who also sits on the party’s National Executive Committee and has worked tirelessly to make the Labour Party electable again, spoke to Left Foot Forward about the challenges the government faces, from immigration, to the state of the economy, and why Andy Burnham is not the answer.
While Burnham and others have criticised the direction of the party amid the growing threat of Reform UK, Gurinder highlighted how change is being delivered but cautioned that there were no ‘quick fixes’.
He said: “When we were elected last year we promised a lot of changes and the country did need a lot of changes and we are delivering on that. If you look at the King’s speech last year, it was packed full of stuff and this government is delivering.”
He added: “We spent fourteen years in opposition and we’re now delivering on that, you look at the workers’ rights legislation, you look at the money going into schools and breakfast clubs, we’re doing trade deals, there’s so much we’re doing and it’s sometimes easy to forget what we all are doing and there’s a lot more to do and we know that.”
Speculation had been building in recent weeks about Burnham challenging Starmer for the leadership, something he repeatedly refused to rule out before rowing back at conference, saying that Starmer was the best person for the job.
Asked about Burnham’s comments that the party needed more open internal debate about its future direction, Gurinder said: “Andy Burnham is not helping the cause, by bringing the focus onto leadership that’s not helpful at all, if we want to talk about ideas we should do that but Andy Burnham is not the solution to anything.
“When we look around this conference people are incredibly united and people are really proud of the work we’re doing and they want us to continue, we don’t need to be diverting and Andy Burnham does not have a solution to any of that.”
Gurinder has also been a life-long campaigner against hatred and extremism and is a trustee of anti-extremism campaign group Hope not Hate, which has done outstanding work in pushing back against the narratives of the far-right.
At a time when there is a palpable sense of fear amongst many minority communities following the rise of the far-right and racist rhetoric, we asked Gurinder about what he made of the immigration debate and the way it’s being framed.
‘In my constituency, we fly the union flag as my predecessor did and we carry on doing that and I’m very proud of that”, he said.
“We’ve seen flags go up in lots of places, now people are patriotic but people do wonder what’s behind it and there is a sense of fear not just among BAME communities but also by some people putting up the flag”.
Echoing the Prime Minister’s criticism of globalisation, he said the country had become ‘too reliant on free trade and global markets’, adding: “What does that mean, well it means that everything is made in China because it’s cheaper, if it’s made there not here, industry’s shut down and these things have an impact on people economically and then resentment can come in very easily.”
To counter that, Gurinder says the key lies in ‘reindustrialising, bringing back good quality jobs to the UK, it’s about understanding that in this changing world we need to be more self-sufficient on a lot of things, whether it defence, energy, security.”
He went on to add that the immigration debate is important because people don’t like the unfairness of the asylum system.
‘I’ve always believed you have to have a fair policy but you enforce it robustly and that’s where the Tories absolutely failed, and this is where the Labour Party are making a difference, we are putting more resources into the Home Office we are making decisions and where people are not entitled to be here we should remove them from the country and that’s what we’re doing.
“The impact will take time to work through.”
Basit Mahmood is editor of Left Foot Forward
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