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Thursday 4 December 2008

New Labour’s final collapse

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?

Scotland has, for decades, been Labour’s most dependable stronghold. The party has prevailed in every single local and general election in the country for the last five decades. When John Reid is asked why there are so many Scots in the Cabinet, he explains that the party was pushed back to its heartlands in the 1980s, with the consequence that MPs of any experience tended to hail from the north, or the Celtic fringe.

Now these heartlands are ablaze, and Labour’s Judgment Day is at hand. In the north of England, the party’s vote is demoralised and the electorate generally is unconvinced, to put it mildly, that Gordon Brown would represent renewal. In the south, the areas which Tony Blair conquered in the mid-1990s are steadily turning blue again. So the battle in the last days before the May elections in Scotland, Wales and the English local authorities is not so much between Labour and the opposition parties — but a struggle between these parties for the vote which Labour has alienated all by itself.

Tony Blair may hope, in a last noble gesture, to shoulder the blame for Labour’s performance — but the problems raised on the doorsteps in Labour areas are not exclusively related to him. They are gripes about Iraq, the renewal of the Trident nuclear deterrent, Mr Brown’s raid on pension funds and the stench of sleaze from the cash-for-honours investigation.

On the stump, one senses the voters reaching for the nearest and strongest stick with which to beat Labour. In the more deprived areas of the West Midlands and Yorkshire, for example, that stick is the BNP — or its offshoot, England First. But in Scotland, the anti-Labour forces appear to have united.

In a café in Govan, I approach a suntanned man in a suit who introduces himself as Gordon Anderson, a salesman, and announces that he is voting SNP for the first time. ‘I’ve had enough of the European Human Rights Act, of these prisoners claiming compensation because they go cold turkey in jail,’ he says. ‘The system is geared towards the criminal, not the public.’

It is hard to see what the pro-EU, left-leaning SNP would do to correct such failures. But Mr Anderson sees no other options. He is left cold by David Cameron — ‘he seems to go whatever way public opinion blows him’ — and the Conservatives, in any case, have such little presence on the ground that he did not consider them. He is against independence, but will vote SNP anyway. ‘When the referendum comes, I’ll vote against and so will everyone else.’

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