Politics

16 May 2009

Martin Bright reviews the week in politics

The Labour party now has three weeks to save itself from oblivion. The only question facing MPs is whether the open fratricide that would follow a challenge to Gordon Brown would be preferable to the death by a thousand humiliating cuts if the Prime Minister sits tight at Number 10.

The European and local council elections on 4 June have been as good as written off by the party. Beyond the Prime Minister’s inner circle there is now a tangible fury at Gordon Brown, with the Damian McBride affair, the Gurkha fiasco and the expenses scandal merely reinforcing what they knew already about the Prime Minister. Where there was once grudging respect and then pity there is now barely disguised disdain. One Labour backbencher told me this week: ‘If on 5 June Alan Johnson was minded to say he was a candidate, a large number of people would crush Gordon in the rush to nominate him. Gordon Brown is destroying the Labour party.’

Last summer, I remember one minister who supported David Miliband’s challenge to the Prime Minister describing the situation as ‘unsustainable’. Is there a situation beyond unsustainable? Reaching for the lexicon of environmental clichés, the obvious word would be ‘meltdown’, but what is happening within the Labour party is now beyond even that. We are approaching the collapse of the whole Labour eco-system.

Like global warming itself, this has been a gradual process and some people will be in denial until it is too late to reverse the effects of the disaster. But there is now the real possibility that the Labour party will drift like so much polar ice into third-party status. This will not happen immediately and almost certainly not before the next general election. But there is now a potentially lethal pincer movement at work, which will see the Liberal Democrats picking up the residue of left-leaning middle-class voters who still cannot face voting Conservative, while the extreme Right eats into Labour’s working-class heartlands. Some, like Jon Cruddas and Peter Hain, have been warning about this for years, but the party leadership was too distracted by the Blair-Brown carnival and the hubris of easy election victories to listen to the Cassandras.

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