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Monday 7 July 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?

This is key to understanding the SNP revival. It has successfully decoupled itself from the issue of independence and Labour’s attempts to argue the contrary are falling as flat as William Hague’s ‘Keep the Pound’ campaign in 2001. On the ballot papers, where parties can describe themselves any way they like, the SNP will call itself ‘Alex Salmond for First Minister’. Its pitch is not to destroy the Union but to replace Jack McConnell, Scotland’s First Minister, with a more able man. Mr Salmond’s party has simply become the convenient vehicle of the nationwide anti-Labour rebellion.

Meanwhile, in the village of Dawley in Shropshire, George Osborne is doing his best to persuade voters that the Conservatives should be their particular Labour-busters. The south of England is ready to believe so, but the north needs more convincing. In Gateshead, Knowsley, Liverpool, Manchester and Newcastle, the Tories have no councillors at all, and in Sheffield, only two. As the shadow Chancellor speaks to local shopkeepers, the problem becomes apparent.

The stories they tell him are grimly familiar across town centres in England: anti-social behaviour, quickly mutating into criminality. Helen Avraam, who runs the Flying Fish, tells the shadow Chancellor how children robbed her chip shop. ‘They covered their faces with plastic bags and forgot to cut air holes, bless them, so they started hyperventilating,’ she says. The staff then gave chase, but the culprits were never caught. Her sister-in-law, who also runs a chip shop, was robbed at gunpoint. The streets, she says, grow more dangerous by the year.

She asks Mr Osborne to ‘please do something’. He asks her to vote Conservative. She smiles politely, and says she never discusses politics. We are all standing in a florist shop whose owner, Elsie Ryder, is more forthcoming. ‘I voted for Labour all my life, but never again,’ she says. She too cites the breakdown in law and order, but says she intends to abstain. ‘The not-voting party won’t help you,’ says Mr Osborne. She says her family have always been Labour: abstaining is as far as she is prepared to go.

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