Cooper delivers harsh truths about Labour's Bradford defeat

A senior Labour figure has blamed the party's failure to connect with the Asian community for its shock loss in a Bradford by-election this week.

Speaking days after Respect party candidate George Galloway won the previously safe Labour seat of Bradford West, the shadow Home Secretary Yvette Cooper said the party "wasn't connecting enough with young voters in Bradford's Asian community".

"My sense, too, is that we weren't connecting enough with Muslim women in Bradford," she told the BBC.

Ms Cooper's comments stand in contrast to a rather more upbeat assessment by the Labour leader Ed Miliband, who insisted that the past week would be remembered as "the end of the Cameron project".

He said: "Thursday night was a very bad result [for Labour] but there is a big picture about where politics is and I think people will look back on the last few weeks and say, 'that was when the Cameron project hit the buffers'."