Education secretary faces questions after chaotic first year of Labour government | Politics News

The first guest on this week’s edition of Sunday Morning With Trevor Phillips is Lord Neil Kinnock, who led the Labour Party from 1983-1992.

He told Trevor that Labour’s first year in government was “not a mess”, but said: “What’s gone wrong is really the lack of a narrative, a story of the objectives of the government, and why they’re working towards it and how they’re working towards it.”

He went on to say that a series of “really commendable and absolutely essential policies” are “barely noticed”.

That, he argued, is “because they’re obscured by all this song and dance, and noise, drums banging and cymbals clashing of the winter fuel payment being massively reduced and then restored, the welfare program, the two child benefit cap, the cuts in development aid”.

“All of those negative things that really are heartily disliked across the Labour movement and more widely, much more widely,” he said.

“And that means that apart from the distaste for undertaking those policies, the cloud hangs over the accomplishments of the government, which are substantial and will become greater, and people are not getting the message.”

The government should focus on communicating their accomplishments, he added.

Asked why they have not communicated well, Lord Kinnock said they have had to “put an emphasis on caution and discipline, which was crucial in the wake of the chaos that had gone before under [Jeremy] Corbyn.”

While they restored credibility, they “depressed expectations and limited themselves”.