Crewe, May 22 2008: the day and place in which Gordon Brown’s premiership may have passed the point of no return.
For most of the university students of Britain, this will come as no great shock; you resolved never to tick that box with the rose next to it ever again after it whacked an extra £3,000 a year onto your university expenses. Over the ten years past, however, Labour’s control of British politics had been virtually unassailable.
Despite the war, foot and mouth disease, petrol strikes and dodgy dossiers, people largely had confidence in the government. The bedrock of Labour success, combined with an ineffectual opposition, was a sound, nay flourishing economy, which defined the party’s rhetoric for a decade.
But Melvyn King, Governor of the Bank of England, made clear last week that the good times are over. Unemployment is rising, oil has hit $125 a barrel, and inflation is running at around 4%.
All of this can be blamed on global economic forces and dishonest bankers rather than the government. For the voters of Crewe and Nantwich, however, the culprit is clear: Gordon Brown, who would perhaps be forgiven were it not for the 10p debacle that consigned no fewer than 22 million of us to higher tax.
According to a Guardian/ICM poll published last Tuesday, Labour are a shocking 14 points behind the Conservatives – worse than at any time since May 1987, just before Margaret Thatcher won her third election by a landslide. The poll also asked voters to compare Brown to David Cameron; the latter leads Brown by a 21 point gap today.
In pursuit of ‘triangulation’ and that supposed political nirvana of ‘Middle England’, Labour has become unrecognisible to its core voters. On inheritance tax, on income tax, on immigration, on anti-terrorism legislation, Gordon Brown has maintained the shoddy New Labour practice of stealing the Right’s clothes.
And here we return to Crewe. The people of this old industrial railway seat, which has delivered a Labour MP for the past sixty years, felt out of touch with their longtime party and thus delivered a real blow to Labour by electing a Tory MP last Thursday.
Yet Gordon may be able to reverse this if he reconnects with the core vote. Why not deliver on that pledge to build 3 million new homes? Why not work on his target of eliminating child poverty by 2020, something the Rowntree Foundation says he will fall well short of? What of the pledge for a renewed constitutional settlement?
Drag it out of the mindless tedium of committee discussion and bring it to the people. There are potentially a further two years of this government, and if Brown is bold, he can at least make them two years to remember.
