Southport’s Labour MP Patrick Hurley has called on Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer to lay out a “transition to something new” following Andy Burnham’s Makerfield by-election win.
Speaking on BBC Radio 4 this morning, Patrick Hurley said: “We can’t continue to tell the electorate that they’re wrong.”
Mr Hurley stopped short of calling for a full-member Labour leadership contest, instead arguing: “I come back to the point that people are telling me over and over and over again, they want, they are impatient, people want urgency, people want to see us with a level of ambition that they don’t, that they perceive we’ve not had for the past two years.
“I don’t think that asking them to wait another few months whilst the Labour Party sorts itself out yet again is a tenable position for us to ask the electorate to go through.”
“I’ve been loyal to Keir Starmer publicly and privately, and I think he’ll go down in history as a monumental figure in Labour Party politics. He absolutely changed the party from top to bottom after the defeat in 2019, which was a historic defeat. And within five years, he’d taken us to a historic victory. But I do think that, you know, to everything there is a season, and I think right now we need to transition to something new.
“I spent many weeks campaigning in the local elections and I’ve been spending a lot of time in Makerfield campaigning in this by-election and people are telling me over and over and over again that Keir’s strengths – that he’s careful, he’s methodical, he’s forensic – that it’s not what the country needs right now, that what the country needs is speed, urgency, decisive action. And after two years, I think that what the people of the country are telling me… what they want, I think we should be listening to them. We can’t continue to tell the electorate that they’re wrong.
“The challenges that we inherited back in 2024 were overwhelming. The country has been in the worst state it’s been in, in peacetime, in maybe a century.
“We’ve had a record of success. We’ve had great success in terms of power being brought into the workplace, in terms of the children that we’re bringing out of poverty, but the scale of the challenge has just proven that people at the top of government are not up to the scale of that challenge. And that’s no reflection on people at the top of government.
“I think too often our response to the many, many problems this country’s had over the last decade or more has been to announce a task force or a commission or a review. What we’ve not done sufficiently is to take decisive action and make that decisive action in a speedy and urgent fashion. And that’s what people are telling us that they want. They voted for change in 2024 and people are saying they’re seeing the change, they’re just not seeing it quick enough.
“There should be a transition. I don’t particularly want a leadership election. I think that would tempt candidates into making spending commitments to win votes and then being tempted to have to backtrack on that. I think that the will of the country is obvious. I think that the will of the Parliamentary Labour Party is obvious. And I think that really we need to now see the Prime Minister set out a transition and a process now.
“I mean, there’s a case to be made that you could have a leadership contest that could take through the summer months and we’d be in a period of status again for the next two to three months. But again, I come back to the point that people are telling me over and over and over again, they want, they are impatient, people want urgency, people want to see us with a level of ambition that they don’t, that they perceive we’ve not had for the past two years. And I don’t think that asking them to wait another few months whilst the Labour Party sorts itself out yet again is a tenable position for us to ask the electorate to go through. I think we just need to seize the mantle and give the country the urgency that they are asking us for.”