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As the offspring of a by election: I love ‘em! The excitement. The saturation political bombing. The escape from Westminster to the real world. But I have been uneasy about Crewe and Nantwich from the start. The loss of Gwyneth, my political mistress. The rush to the polls. The Little Lord Fauntleroy campaign. Tamsin Dunwoody’s failure to inherit her mother’s independence.
Now the result. A brass knuckled disaster. We’ve been lucky with by elections for 11 years. Few losses, protests siphoned off to Lib Dem irrelevance, a painted bucket to spit into. Not an alternative. Now suddenly everything’s changed. The Tories are back in business. The Lib Dems are fading away. The people are fed up with us. It’s totally disorientating for Labour MPs to discover they’re not loved.
By elections do only psychological damage, but this is huge and will hit morale. It’s also directed mainly at Gordon who is our chosen and irremovable leader. No use talking of revolts, coups or delegations of men in designer suits. We are the Labour Party, loyal to our leaders long after they’ve failed, and in any case Gordon hasn’t. He lacks Tony’s thespian skills but it’s about time for a serious figure.
Tories are quick with a knife in the back, a body in the river, and have used that on Mrs T and all her successors until they discovered their own version of Tony Blair at the same time as we junked ours.
Now we are in for a tough time. There is nothing worse than the Tory Party with its tail up. Unless it’s Labour with its tail down. Bemused, upset to discover the people aren’t grateful for all we have done for them, divided and unused to not being loved. It’s like drowning after 11 years of walking on water.
Crewe and Nantwich is the kind of seat we should have held like my by election in Grimsby. Its member Gwyneth like Foreign Secretary Antony Crosland was loved and died “on the job” as Mrs Thatcher would put it. The Chancellor had resolved the 10 pence tax blunder by giving everyone on the basic rate a rebate, and though the people are clearly upset because their living standards have been squeezed by rocketing fuel food and utility prices and local government charges, none of this was our fault.
Sadly by elections are an opportunity to sling off, not to sling out, so people didn’t consider the Tory alternative or weigh up our record as they will do at the General Election in May 2010. They made a protest and quite right too. The message is clear and it goes primarily to Gordon (copied to the rest of us). This is the end of the line for New Labour.
Brothers, we are not on our way, and we have got to change because we are in a new and much tougher ball game where it is no use unveiling a collection of trivia like last week’s Advance Queen’s Speech and expecting that to satisfy people. No use telling them we are getting on with the job, when they don’t like the job we are doing. No use saying the Tories don’t have an alternative because that’s not their job. It’s ours.
The golden weather we have enjoyed for 11 years is over. We are heading for recession. People are frightened and new times demand new policies. New problem. New Gordon.
So Gordon must listen to the people and the party. Something he has not been good at up to now. We told him to go to the country last September. He muffed it.
We warned him that scrapping the 10p tax rate would hit the most vulnerable, he ignored it. We pointed out for years that unless councils were brought back into house building and financed to build the much vaunted housing drive would fail as it is now doing.
We have told him that an expensive nuclear deterrent is no longer necessary, that 42 day detention won’t work, and that ID cards will be an expensive disaster. He wouldn’t listen. We complained about the futility of his playing Robin to Bush’s Batman but our troops are still being killed in Iraq and Afghanistan.
So with two years to go Crewe and Nantwich have given Gordon a loud and clear message. You listen or we lose. The chance to bring our work to fruition and build a fair equal society which Labour is all about, is gone. And so are you.
That means an end to New Labour triangulation, letting the bankers run the economy and fawning to wealth, Finance and the Banks. We run the economy for the purposes of the people or we fail. Time now for the people. The People Gord The People.
Economic difficulties don’t mean freeze squeeze cuts and deflation. They need fairness, shared sacrifice and protecting the people. In a recession we must boost spending as Keynes would prescribe and channel it to the people whose living standards have been so badly squeezed. That means not the southern middle class or the northern working class but all working people. It means that instead of defending a Blair legacy which is now dead Gordon has to take on the job for which he is better qualified for than anyone in the party or the country: the pilot who will weather the storm.
And one more thing. Instead of the obsession with boy and girl wonders and reliance on advisers just out of short pants and marketing men who have never met real people or Labour Party members, try listening to oldies who have been through all this before. You could give us a dollop of tender loving care too. After all you can do without any more by elections.
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