BLAIR: NO RETURN TO OLD LABOUR
Ewen MacAskill and Michael White
Tony Blair will today dismiss calls from union leaders to switch the focus of the government's attention to Labour's traditional voters in the wake of the disastrous European election result.
The prime minister will use a speech in Birmingham to make clear that he sees the middle-class and Tory vote as a key Labour target.
"New Labour was elected by people of all ages and backgrounds," he will say. "We will serve people of all ages and backgrounds, including those who did not vote for us at all."
He will signal he will not allow Labour to become solely the party of the working class: he will work hard for the party's core vote, but he will also work hard for the new voters Labour attracted from Middle England. There can be no retreat to Old Labour positions, he will insist.
The prime minister's speech comes after John Edmonds, the leader of the GMB union, yesterday threw his weight behind John Monks, the TUC general secretary, who urged the government to stop ignoring its core vote.
Amid all the soul-searching over the European results, party sources predicted Mr Blair will receive good news today from the party's internal vote. The constituency section of the national executive is often billed as an annual test of the mood of the membership and Lord Sawyer, the former general secretary and Millbank loyalist, has won a place, according to party sources.
The Grassroots Alliance, made up mainly of left-wingers and those who feel the party has become too centralised, took four of the six seats last year but Millbank is believed to have cut the Grassroots Alliance back to three.
Although Millbank said last night that votes were still being counted, the final outcome was shaping up as: from the Grassroots Alliance, Mark Seddon, Liz Davies and Christine Shawcroft; and from the unofficial Millbank slate, Lord Sawyer, Diana Jeuda and Michael Cashman. Turnout was down, reflecting Mill bank's decision to keep the contest low-key.
To the irritation of the party leadership, MPs, union leaders and activists still insist on raking over the ashes of the European results.
Mr Edmonds said yesterday that it seemed the welfare state, the NHS and public transport were not the centrepoint of government policy.
He said: "I think there's a feeling among many Labour voters that they have somehow been left out of the government's strategy. Activists needs policies to boast about."
Mr Edmonds said there should be a redirection of policy back to welfare and the health service - and a reduction in spin.
Mr Seddon, whose re-election to the NEC will be confirmed this morning, backed the trade union leaders.
Many Labour voters were very disappointed about progress on a range of issues, he said.
The prime minister, in his speech, will pour scorn on critics who say he is pandering to conflicting class interests. Mr Blair will make plain that his government serves "people of all ages and backgrounds".
Downing Street last night dismissed as "garbage" suggestions that Labour faces defeat at the next general election in the wake of this month's European election results - "amateur psephology", aides said - or that the speech the prime minister is making today amounts to hitting the panic button.
A Downing Street spokesman said yesterday that the importance of the European results should neither be understated nor overstated. But the idea that Mr Blair should try to please "this class interest with this policy and that class interest with that policy" was absurd. Policies aimed to help ease poverty benefited prosperous suburbanites too.
Support for the government came from the Blairite MP and former Labour election strategist Fraser Kemp. He said: "The hard political truth is that the demography of Britain has changed and we need to ensure that we as a party represent Middle England as well as the traditional core vote. We have to ensure that Labour isn't simply identified as a party of the disadvantaged and the poor.
"We tried that during the 1980s and it didn't work, and the people we wanted to help most in life ended up suffering most under the Tories."
Mr Blair will use the speech, marking the 100,000th young person to get a full-time job under Labour's welfare-to-work New Deal, to claim that Gordon Brown's £3.5bn programme is precisely the sort of pledge that Labour was elected to implement and puts it on course to cut the long-term jobless total by 250,000 by election day. At 70,900 it is already 60% below the 178.000 total when Labour came to power, although experts say that the underlying figures are less impressive.
Mr Blair will say: "That is what we are doing and that is what we will be judged upon." He will cite four key areas of domestic concern: keeping inflation under control to provide a stable macro-economy; improving public services; reforming the welfare state; and helping business, not least through lower company taxes.