Britain’s ruling Labour Party lost one of its safest parliamentary seats on Friday, deepening doubts within the party about Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s ability to win the next election.
Defeat left Brown facing a bleak weekend as the party’s main policy-making forum met to try to figure out how to win back voters disillusioned by a string of political gaffes, rising inflation and a slowing economy.
Adding to the gloom, data published on Friday showed second quarter growth slowed to its weakest rate in three years as private housebuilding slumped, dragging the annual growth rate down to 1,6% from 2,3% in the first quarter.
The pro-independence Scottish National Party (SNP) snatched a slim 365-vote majority in the Glasgow East constituency with a 22,5% swing that overturned the 13 500 majority enjoyed by Labour at the 2005 election.
If that swing against Labour was repeated in a general election even Brown could lose his seat.
”This is a huge protest vote. But I am still sceptical about whether it will lead to any serious attempt to unseat him although he is going to have a difficult time this weekend,” said Wyn Grant, politics professor at Warwick University.
Trade unions will increase pressure on Brown to lean towards their agenda, he said.
The Glasgow East election was called after the Labour incumbent stepped down due to ill health. The constituency has pockets of extreme poverty scarred by unemployment, alcohol and drug addiction.
”We understand and we hear people’s concerns…We know that our role, when facing global economic challenges, is to be on the side of the people of Britain,” Brown told the opening session of the policy-making forum at Warwick University.
”That is why over the next few months you will see in housing and in gas and electricity bills and in energy us doing more to help the hardworking families of this country,” he said in an speech stressing Labour’s past economic successes.
However, power utility EdF Energy, British subsidiary of French Electricite de France, said on Friday it was raising electricity prices by 17% and gas by 22%.
Opposition Conservative leader David Cameron, his party riding high in opinion polls, called for a general election.
Tax, blunders, concessions
The sharp swing from Labour to the SNP is not just a political but also a personal blow to Brown, a Scot, although Labour still has a 62-seat majority in Westminster.
Following a series of recent Labour election defeats, the result will strengthen expectations that the party’s 11 years in power may be nearing an end and that it could lose the next general election, due by early 2010.
”It gives you an idea that Labour does in fact have a very substantial task indeed in front of it,” political analyst John Curtice of Strathclyde University told the BBC.
Defeat adds to the deepening sense of crisis enveloping Brown, whose popularity has slumped since he took over as prime minister from Tony Blair 13 months ago. He has been hurt by the credit crisis, which has hit economic growth and sent house prices sliding, as well as by rising food and energy bills.
He has also made blunders, pulling back from calling a snap general election last year and pushing through tax reforms that hit low earners before he was forced into concessions.
At the policy meeting this weekend, Brown will face not just dismayed party loyalists but disgruntled leaders of the trade unions on which Labour relies for funding. Many of them are in open revolt, saying the party has forgotten the poor.
The anxiety is increased by the fact that Labour lags the Conservatives by up to 20 points in opinion polls, enough to give them an easy victory at the next general election. – Reuters