LABOUR’S leadership contenders should ditch their talk of “aspiration,” former deputy prime minister John Prescott said yesterday.

The Labour peer, who has backed Andy Burnham, said the timetable for selecting a new leader was too short to allow a proper discussion about the party’s future.

His comments came as Blairite former arts minister Kim Howells slated Ed Miliband for being “dull.”

“It’s probably at least as bad as under Michael Foot’s leadership when we were in real dire straits,” former Pontypridd MP Mr Howells said.

“If the Labour Party doesn’t come up with fresh thinking, with some radical analysis of what’s going on in society and what people need out of society, it could well dwindle to a very small number of MPs.

“I think the problem was it was unmitigated gloom and that unmitigated gloom that Miliband promulgated was because nobody is thinking in a radical way within the Labour Party.”

Mr Prescott told the BBC: “Unfortunately, I don’t think there is enough time for that debate in the timetable we have got at the moment and therefore, to that extent, it is limiting the debate when it should be even more than that.”

He echoed Mr Howells’s call for a rethink, saying Labour needed a “fundamental change both in our organisation and the development of our ideas.”

But he rejected the language being used by leadership contenders.

“What the hell does that mean, ‘aspiration’?” he demanded.

“I hear a lot of the candidates talking about it. They’ve clearly got aspiration, but what the heck does it mean?”

Asked if it was “meaningless,” Mr Prescott added: “I think they will recognise that shortly.”

Labour leadership contenders Mr Burnham, Yvette Cooper, Liz Kendall and Mary Creagh have all spoken of the need to reach out to “aspirational” voters — seen as code for not focusing policies on improving living conditions for working-class communities.

Ms Cooper has attempted to present herself as a unity candidate, arguing that Labour should not shift to the left or the right in the wake of its general election defeat.

This has been received as an attack on Blairite Ms Kendall and Mr Burnham, who is thought likely to receive backing from a majority of affiliated trade unions.