Battered, yet again

tauringhuang.

Jul 25th 2008
From Economist.com

A catastrophic electoral defeat for Britain's beleaguered leader, and for his Labour Party

AFP
Editor's note

IN THE days before the parliamentary by-election in Glasgow East on Thursday July 24th, Labour ministers seemed quietly confident that they would win it. After all, the seat was Labour’s third safest in Scotland and 25th safest in the whole of Britain; at the last general election, Labour held it with a majority of 13,507. The confidence turned out to be misplaced. The Scottish Nationalist Party won, narrowly but spectacularly, in one of the greatest by-election shocks of recent history. British newspapers rushed to comment that Gordon Brown, the prime minister, who is also Scottish, had received a “Glasgow kiss”—local parlance for a headbutt.

In the immediate aftermath of the poll, Labour ministers trotted out the usual post-defeat platitudes: that they would learn from the voters’ judgment; that the country was feeling pinched by the deteriorating economy; and so on. It is true that voters often use by-elections—held in this case because the sitting MP stood down on health grounds—to protest against a sitting government, rather than, as they do at general elections, to pick a new one.

Unfortunately for Labour, Glasgow is only the latest in a string of woeful electoral performances for the party under Mr Brown’s leadership. His party lost the London mayoralty to the Conservatives; it was routed in local-council elections; was beaten in a by-election in Crewe and Nantwich, a once-safe-Labour northern seat; and finished fifth, behind the extremist British National Party, in another by-election in Henley. Perhaps even more worryingly, in national opinion polls Labour is flatlining: it is roughly 20 points behind the Tories, in the sort of polling territory that governments find it very hard to come back from.

But Glasgow East—one of the most deprived constituencies in the country—is undoubtedly the worst humiliation of the lot. Glasgow’s east end has been a Labour stronghold for almost as long as the Labour Party has existed. Mr Brown once wrote an admiring biography of an early local socialist MP. Shallow anti-Scottish prejudice of the kind perhaps evident in some bits of England cannot explain why its voters have turned against him and his party so violently. The big question being asked after the Glasgow defeat—though it was already being asked before—is whether Labour will now ditch Mr Brown, replacing him with a new leader and prime minister.

There are certainly lots of Labour MPs who, fearing for their own jobs, would like to do so. They know they would risk looking undemocratic and chaotic if they were to anoint a third prime minister in a single parliamentary term. But the fear is that Mr Brown will lead them to a general-election defeat so catastrophic that the party will be out of office for a decade or more—and perhaps, in defeat, be commandeered by the unelectable left, as it was in the early 1980s.

Yet for all the gloom in the Labour ranks, there is no sign as yet of a formal leadership challenge, or of a potential alternative (such as David Miliband, the foreign secretary or Alan Johnson, the health secretary), publicly breaking ranks with the prime minister. Fatalism seems to be the principal mood—though that may change at or before the annual party conference in September.

For the SNP, the implications may not be quite as rosy as they appear. The nationalists were aided by strife and chaos inside the Scottish Labour Party. They now run Scotland’s devolved government, but only since last year, and so were able to portray themselves as insurgents rather than dowdy incumbents: the longer they are in office, the more room for disappointments there will be. Most important, the SNP’s ultimate aim—Scottish independence—was a non-issue in the Glasgow East campaign, so the result cannot be interpreted as a surge of nationalist sentiment. That is true in Scotland generally: for all the SNP’s electoral success, only a minority of Scots wants independence.

As for David Cameron, the rampant Conservative leader, who earlier in the week had mischievously pointed out that his party does not hold a single seat as statistically safe as Glasgow East, he advised Mr Brown to take his holiday (in Suffolk) and then hold a general election. Mr Cameron knows that is unlikely; but whenever the election comes (June 2010 is the last possible date), he will doubtless be hoping that hapless Mr Brown is still his opponent.



Editor's note: The image that originally accompanied this story has been replaced.