Blair rejects targets on jobs and wages: Leadership favourite supports principle of full employment

CLEAR DIFFERENCES over targets for full employment and a minimum wage emerged yesterday between Tony Blair and John Prescott in the Labour leadership campaign.

In a series of interviews, Mr Blair said he would support the principle of full employment and a minimum wage, but did not wish to see the Opposition under his leadership committed to fixed targets: 'I am not going to make promises I can't keep.'

Mr Prescott, campaigning in defence of traditional values, said: 'I want to put full employment at the top of the political agenda. I want to set a figure that people know we can be measured against . . . I don't think people are going to be satisfied with rhetoric.'

Yesterday, Mr Blair had secured the support of about 130 Labour MPs, including most of the Shadow Cabinet.

Ken Livingstone, the left-wing MP, threw his hat into the ring, but it is unlikely he will get the required 34 MPs to nominate him. He had said Mr Blair would be 'the most extreme right-wing leader Labour ever had', but Mr Blair retorted: 'I think he used to say the same about John Smith.'

Mr Blair said on BBC-TV's Breakfast with Frost yesterday that he would re-establish the commitment to full employment defined in the 1944 White Paper by the Churchill coalition government, which said it should be the responsibility of government to ensure there was 'a high and stable level of employment'.

He refused to get into bidding with Mr Prescott, who appeared to seek a reduction in unemployment to 2.5 per cent of the workforce - about 700,000 - and to make a start within a Parliament on reducing unemployment to 1 million. 'My position is exactly the same as John Smith's. I don't favour putting targets on it,' Mr Blair said.

'The public has had a government over the past few years that has not told us the truth, that has deceived us. I am not going to make promises I can't keep.'

On the issue of the minimum wage, Mr Blair said: 'It's important we have a formula for deciding what the levels of the minimum wage are, but that is something that, under John Prescott, is being looked at by the Labour Party economic policy commission. It is right that you have that minimum threshold below which nobody falls. I do not favour putting a figure on that.'

Mr Blair also showed he was prepared to continue the task of jettisoning some of the electoral baggage of the Labour Party, which Neil Kinnock began.

He said it was not one of his priorities to drop 'clause four' on public ownership from the party's constitution. However, he went on to abandon Labour's 1992 manifesto commitment to take back into public control the privatised water industry.

Privatisation of water was wrong, but the answer was to impose proper regulation and control, rather than to buy back private share capital in privatised companies.

'The public would not respond very kindly if the Labour Party spent its money on repurchasing private share capital instead of improving public services,' Mr Blair said.

TONY BLAIR'S MANIFESTO

The key items in Tony Blair's platform are:

Minimum wage - supports the principle, but not a fixed figure;

Full employment - supports 'high and stable' employment, but no fixed target, and no commitment on timetable;

Clause Four public ownership - repeal not a priority;

Privatised public services such as water - 'wrong' but should be regulated, not brought back into public ownership;

Trade union rights - no return to closed shop but workers should have a right to join a union;

Unions and Labour - no plans to sever links;

PR for Westminster - supports referendum on it.