New Labour’s final collapse

Fraser Nelson

25 April 2007

Fraser Nelson takes to the road and finds voters turning to whichever parties will maximise the mutiny against Blair and Brown. The SNP is now a party of protest, not separatism — but have the Tories done enough to stay on track for power?

When locals give chase in a deprived Glasgow housing estate, it is normally a signal to run. The woman who started coming towards the Scottish National Party campaigners I was with on Tuesday certainly seemed angry: perhaps we’d blocked her driveway, or sullied her carpet with separatist literature. But her gripe was with Labour. ‘I’m a nurse, and I’ve seen the Health Service really suffer under them,’ she said, demanding various SNP pamphlets. ‘I’m never voting for them again.’

There could be no more striking dramatisation of the collapse in Labour support ahead of the 3 May elections. This nurse embodied the Labour core vote. She was right in saying the NHS has grown worse: average waiting times for an operation are a fortnight longer than they were under Margaret Thatcher. But this is because the Labour administration has given so much of the extra money to staff, and shielded them from Tony Blair’s reforms. And instead of gratitude, it is facing insurrection.