Across the pond

The Sunday newspapers are full of stories about plots, including cabinet ministers, to get rid of Prime Minister Gordon Brown following Friday’s poll result at Glasgow East. Although Labour had an excellent and popular candidate, voters of all parties united to deliver a 22 per cent swing against the government. The winner was the Scottish Nationalist Party, the only party with any hope of toppling Labour in what was in 2005 their 25th safest seat.

Alex Salmand, the SNP leader, led a high profile campaign to get his own supperters to the polling booths. But the trendy new young leaders of the Conservative and Liberal Democratic parties played it softly softly. In consequence most of their supporters either stayed at home or delivered a tactical anti-Labour vote.

Of course this would not happen in a General Election. And of course Scotland is different from the rest of the country. But this result coming on top of Labour’s defeat at Crewe shows unmistakedly that Labour has lost the confidence of its industrial heartlands. And the saddest fact Brown has to face as he goes off for his annual holiday in Conservative territory in Southwold in Suffolk is that this final blow has been delivered by his fellow Scots.

The reality of the situation in the Labour Party could not be further away from plotting by fiercely ambitious men or women eager to knife their leader in the back. Because, of course, any potential contender knows that the chances of Labour winning another term of office in 2210, when it will have been in office for thirteen years, are very slight indeed.

Neither is the party plagued by the huge gulf in ideology and policies that plagued the Labour Party in 1950s and 1960s, when the Party leaders included Hugh Gaitskill and Roy Jenkins on the right and Nye Bevan and Tony Benn on the left. The differences between Brownites and the Blairites are minute by comparison, both in domestic policies and on foreign affairs.

New Labour is currently failing because of the economic cycle. New Labour came to power on an economic upturn. So that Blair and Brown won back the support of the professional leftish classes, who torpedoed Labour when they deserted to form the Social Democratic Party, now merged with the old Liberal Party.

In fact, New Labour has been in everything except name, a social democratic party, whose policies are broadly similar to those of the social democratic parties in Europe and to the Democratic Party in the US.

Although Gordon Brown, unlike Tony Blair, has been committed Labour throughout his life, he has totally lost touch with his roots. His worst mistake was the abolition of the 10 per cent tax rate, which hit those who could least afford to be hit when the economy is going into the most serious recession in the lives of any first time voters.

Almost everyone in the party sees that, except Gordon Brown himself. But as he walks around the Suffolk marshes during his summer break he may well come to see the impossility of rebuilding the Labour Party in a swamp.

He can still rescue his dignity, and perhaps his place in history, by iniatating a leadership election in the autumn. That is the best way of avoiding plots and back stabbing.

And that is what democracy is all about. Let the party and the people decide in an open contest.

Meanwhile it is business as usual. And Brown had no trouble in putting on a big smile when he met with Barack Obama in the garden behind his Downing Street office. Maybe he was hoping that some of the Obamania, which was raging through Europe all last week, would stick to him. (The photo is from Getty.)