Labour need to use their upcoming Party Conference to prove they are ready to govern, according to the man in charge of their campaign.
Speaking in the aftermath of last night’s success in Scotland, Pat McFadden, the party’s National Campaign Coordinator, said it was up to his party to pick up the pieces of Tory chaos.
He told GB News: “We go into our conference in a confident frame of mind, but also, we know the scale of the challenge after the last election. We've changed the Labour Party. It's not a very different force from the one that was offered to the electorate a few years ago. Keir Starmer has driven that change. Now the project is to lay out in front of the country the kind of policies that Labour would put in place were we to win the next election. The next step in doing that is our conference which starts this weekend in Liverpool. So you'll see a policy rich conference and one that will make clear that as the country wants change, the only people who can deliver that change are the Labour Party.”
Mr McFadden also dismissed Tory criticism of Labour’s position on HS2.
He said: “I thought it was ironic the Conservative Party making so much out of that when the central position of their own conference was an enormous u-turn on HS2 and the announcement of a bunch of rail projects that have been announced many, many times but which the Conservative Party has failed to deliver.
“The whole story of HS2 has been a Tory fiasco, and like any opposition approaching an election, what you have to do is look at the situation that you inherit, not the one that you'd wish to inherit - but the one that you inherit.
We'll have to pick up the pieces and put together a good transport plan for the country. And that's exactly what we intend to do.”
Commenting on Labour's announcements today on dentistry he added: “Today we've announced a new plan to address the crisis in NHS dentistry, where we've got five million people who've been unable to get a dentist appointment over the past couple of years. We've got a real crisis in dental health among children, where we've had 40,000 children admitted to hospital with decaying teeth and having to have operations to have teeth removed. We are putting forward a plan this morning as we go into our Conference to address that crisis to get NHS dentistry particularly to the areas which are needed most. This is the kind of policy that will address the issues people are concerned about right now and you'll hear a lot more like that over the coming week.”
Watch the interview in full above.
