New Labour faces 'challenge' in regaining public trust

Breakfast with Frost, Sunday 21 September 2003

Labour needed to "renew its relationship with the electorate".

The Home Secretary, David Blunkett admitted that Labour's defeat in last week's Brent East by-election demonstrated that the party faced "a very big challenge" in regaining public trust.

He said there would be no change of policies, but a much greater effort to explain them.

"We can't go into a bunker and retrench," Mr Blunkett told Sir David Frost.

"We have got to come out, we have got to show people that we know where we are going, what our values are about, and that the things we are doing actually relate to people's lives, that we are on their side."

ID cards face scepticism

Mr Blunkett also talked in detail about his policies on asylum, and identity cards. He admitted that the government haven't 'a clue' how many people have entered Britain illegally.

"The reason we haven't is because of course we don't have a rigorous and enforceable identification system linked to a register of all those who are in the country," he said.

He agreed that there was still "genuine scepticism" about how his plans for ID cards would work. And asked whether a Bill to introduce them would be included in the forthcoming legislative programme, he said:

"My hope is that we will do that; we're debating the Queen's Speech at the moment, let's see if we can get that through."

Governments go through difficult periods Alastair Campbell

Sir David also interviewed the Prime Minister's departing communications chief, Alastair Campbell, who agreed that the government was going through a difficult patch.

Until now, he said, it had been "defying political gravity".

He went on: "Governments go through difficult periods.

"But the reality is that if governments do the right thing for people's living standards and jobs and public services, they will get there in the end."

Mr Campbell was speaking from Newcastle where he was about to take party in the Great North Run, in aid of Leukaemia Research.

He was competing alongside Tricia Stewart, one of the original 'Calendar Girls' who bared all to raise money for the charity and whose story is now the subject of the hit film.

'This is not a party that is dying on its feet'.

Rivals in Lib Dems' sights

Also on the programme, the Liberal Democrat leader Charles Kennedy talked about his party's victory in Brent East, insisting that their success could be repeated elsewhere.

"The big problem for the Tories now is that we are the principal challengers to them in very many of their constituencies right across the country," he told Sir David.

His message to disillusioned Tory voters was that "their previous party of allegiance threw in the towel in this by-election, while we took the fight to the Government and won."

The newspapers were reviewed by Boris Johnson and Carol Voderman

Sir David also interviewed Andrew Lloyd Webber about his art collection, which is on public display for the first time at the Royal Academy in London.

The newspapers were reviewed by Carol Voderman, David Davies of the Football Association, and the Conservative MP Boris Johnson.

Interview with Andrew Lloyd Webber

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