CORRECTION: in my As the tide turns post I said the Crewe and Nantwich by-electoin was last Thursday 8 May when it was actually yesterday 22 May.
With today’s news that the Conservative party have trumped Labour out of their ‘safe’ Crewe and Nantwich parliamentary seat, I see Tony Blair sitting in a little room watching television screaming ‘what have you done to my party, Brown?!’ Arguably they could have still lost this election with Tony still in power for two reasons:
- There were enough calls for Blair to step down just before he finally did. If he were still in power now, there’s every chance this would have happened anyway as a message to him to step down.
- The Labour party’s popularity has steadily been going down since the invasion of Iraq and other terrorism-related problems (e.g. 28-day detention and other stripping of civil rights).
The main problem for Brown that most likely caused this election defeat is his government’s recent decision to scrap the 10p tax rate. Don’t ask me what it is but it somehow greatly affects the less well off in society. They then decided not to scrap it because they had pissed so many people off with the idea. The electorate are now turning their backs on Labour in massive numbers as witnessed by this recent event. Labour originally held this seat with a 7,000 majority but Conservatives won last night with a majority of nearly 8,000.
But returning to my original point, I really think Blair is looking on his New Labour party with extreme disgust and shouting ‘what have you done? I left you the party (and country for the most part) in fairly good working order and you’ve gone and bloody dismantled it.’ It’s like a father who has given his son a prized posession – a watch or tool handed down through the generations – and the son has sat on it or lost it or in some other way ruinted it. The father would be extremely unhappy. The voters have certainly shown they are. RIP Gordon.