Labour MPs issue PM 'wake-up call'

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They are among 12 Labour MPs suggesting that voters' faith in the Government's economic competence has 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 points to a "malaise" in public services and questions the wisdom of Chancellor Alistair Darling's £2.7 billion tax U-turn earlier this year.

The wake-up call for the Prime Minister comes in an article signed by, among others, former health secretary Patricia Hewitt.

In the piece for Progress magazine, the MPs said: "Labour needs to provide a convincing new narrative if left-of-centre politics are to remain the driving force in Britain. 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". And 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.

"Tax is very good for raising money to pay for public services and universal benefits. It is not very good for targeting money at particular pressure points."

Besides Ms Hewitt, the article's signatories include former culture minister Janet Anderson, former Home Office minister George Howarth, former Transport ministers Stephen Ladyman and Karen Buck and former deputy Commons leader Paddy Tipping. Others are backbenchers Eric Joyce, Sally Keeble, Martin Linton, Shona McIsaac, Margaret Moran and Tom Levitt.