Rayner: Labour must step up and make the case for power

Angela Rayner has urged Labour colleagues to "step up" and make the case for why the party should be in power as the government attempts to draw a line under a tumultuous first year in office.

- Pippa Crerar

The deputy prime minister told Labour MPs to focus on the party's achievements over the past 12 months rather than "always thinking" about failures, saying they should all be "message carriers" for what had been done well.

But she warned of big challenges ahead, with changes in areas such as infrastructure investment taking years to bear fruit. "These things take time to lead in," she said. That's the challenge with politics. Everybody wants something mañana. It's like, gotta have it immediately."

In an interview with the Guardian as MPs prepared to break for the summer recess, Rayner also said she was not afraid of Nigel Farage, and that tough action against rebellious Labour MPs was "justified".

She said it was a "moral mission" to bring down child poverty, that she would feel "wounded" if the government did not hit its target of 1.5m new homes, and that it was determined to "break the doom loop" of low economic growth and high taxes.

However, speaking in her office in the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government, Rayner made clear she expected her colleagues, from Keir Starmer down, to do a better job of arguing for what they believed in.

"We all have to step up and make that case. It's the job of all of us in the wider Labour movement," she said, citing achievements such as falling NHS waiting lists, funding increases for housing and rising wages. "I often go to Labour fundraisers and joke that the Tories will do 4% of their manifesto and then go on about that 4% as if they've delivered the whole lot. In our Labour movement, we'll do 96% of it, but we'll go on about the 4% that we never managed to achieve.