ANKARA
The UK's Shadow Health Secretary Andy Burnham and Shadow Home Secretary Yvette Cooper have both announced their bids to lead Britain’s main opposition Labour Party.
Burnham, seen as the frontrunner and trade unions’ candidate, said in a recorded video message on Thursday: "The party that I love has lost its emotional connection with millions of people.
"Our challenge is… to rediscover the beating heart of Labour, and that is about the aspirations of everyone, speaking to them like we did in 1997."
Burnham ran for the Labour leadership in 2010 but lost to Ed Miliband, who resigned last week after taking "absolute and total responsibility" for Labour’s defeat in the general election.
Both former Prime Minister Tony Blair, who led Labour to three consecutive election victories from 1997 by moving the party rightwards in a movement he called New Labour, and his fellow New Labour architect Peter Mandelson, have claimed the party has moved leftwards and ignored the concerns of what they term the "aspirational middle classes".
In a nod to the criticisms, Burnham ended his video saying: "Labour wins when it speaks to everyone and for the whole country, for middle England but also Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.
“It needs a leader whose voice can carry into all the nations and regions of the UK.”
The liberal-left Guardian newspaper reported Burnham already had the nominations of more than 60 MPs for his party leadership bid.
Cooper made her announcement in the center-left Daily Mirror newspaper, saying her party had to "move beyond the old labels of left and right".
She did not run for the party leadership in 2010 so as not to damage the chances of her husband and leadership contender, Ed Balls, who was Labour’s Shadow Chancellor until he narrowly lost his seat in last week’s election, clearing the way for Cooper to stand for the leadership.
Cooper wrote: "In the end, Labour didn’t convince enough people that we had the answers.
"When there’s too little hope, optimism or confidence, the politics of anger, fear and division takes over."
“The fracturing of politics reflects the fracturing of our country and our communities. Divided between rich and poor, north and south, city and small town. And it leaves Britain a darker, narrower place.
“But that’s why Labour needs to be bigger in our appeal, bolder in our ambitions and brighter about the future.”
Their announcements came after Shadow Business Secretary Chuka Umunna and Shadow Care Secretary Liz Kendall announced their respective bids for the Labour leadership.
Umunna, who comes from the right-wing of the Labour Party, is seen as a leading candidate of the Blairite faction of Labour.
In an amateur Facebook video, he said Labour had lost working-class voters to the right-wing Eurosceptic UKIP and middle-class voters to the ruling center-right Conservative Party.
Liz Kendall, another Blairite, announced on Monday that she would be standing for the leadership, saying it was “maybe time” her party had a female leader.
Shadow Education Secretary Tristram Hunt is expected to announce his bid in the coming days.
David Miliband, who lives in New York and is the president of the International Rescue Committee charity and who was beaten by his brother Ed for the leadership of the party in 2010, has ruled himself out of the current leadership election.
Ed Miliband has said he is willing to support Labour’s next leader as a front bench minister.
The winner of the Labour leadership contest will be announced at a special party conference on Sept. 12, 2015.
