Labor Party Suffers Defeat in Scotland
By JOHN F. BURNS and ALAN COWELL
Published: July 26, 2008
LONDON — In one of its worst electoral setbacks in years, Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s Labor Party suffered a huge defeat in a Scottish by-election, raising new questions about his leader’s ability to hold onto the job he has held for barely 12 months.
More unsettling yet for politicians in London, the defeat, announced on Friday, came at the hands of the separatist Scottish National Party which supports independence for Scotland.
Mr. Brown himself is Scottish and the Labor Party, which has long viewed Scotland as a fief, has counted heavily on its Scottish seats to cement its majority in general elections.
In the 2005 general election, Labor posted a majority of 13,500 in the Glasgow East constituency _ its third safest seat in Scotland, and 25th safest seat in Britain. But as the result was announced Friday, it became clear that many Labor loyalists in the constituency, with one of the highest unemployment rates and lowest rates expectancy in Britain, had switched their loyalties and given the Scottish National Party a margin of 365 votes.
The Glasgow by-election was called after a Labor legislator, David Marshall, resigned on what he described as health grounds, but when he was also facing awkward questions about his parliamentary expenses.
In what was reckoned to be the worst electoral defeat for the party in Scotland for 20 years, Labor’s Margaret Curran polled 10,912 votes _ 19 percent below Labor’s tally in the 2005 general election.
The Scottish National Party’s John Mason won 11,277, 26 percent higher than his party’s share in 2005. The Scottish nationalists’ performance owed as much to their rising fortunes across Scotland in recent years as to Labor’s plunging popularity under Mr. Brown.
Once a marginal party, the nationalists have seen their popularity soar during the past year, when the Scottish government, created by a constitutional devolution initiated by the former prime minister, Tony Blair, has been headed by Alex Salmond, a former economist who is the Scottish National Party’s leader.
Mr. Salmond campaigned intensively in the by-election, while Mr. Brown stayed away.
The prospect of a stronger National Party in Scotland troubles politicians across the political spectrum because the party has promised its followers a referendum on whether Scotland should secede from Britain and declare independence, ending a union that began in 1707.
Opinion polls in Scotland consistently show that less than a third of voters there favor full independence, but a majority in the polls have supported broadening the devolution process that Mr. Blair began.
Normally, a margin of the kind Labor held in Glasgow would be enough to insulate a candidate . But Labor is enduring one of the biggest slumps in postwar political history, with a range of national opinion polls showing a lead of 20 points and more for the opposition Conservatives and Labor at risk of falling into third place behind the Liberal Democrats.
If the swing in the Glasgow vote was repeated in a general election, with about 20 percent of voters abandoning their support for Labor, many members of government, including the prime minister himself, who holds a Scottish seat, would be at risk of being ousted from parliament and Labor would be routed nationally.
A general election must be held before the end of Labor’s third five-year term in power, by June 2010. Concerns about their own parliamentary futures are sweeping through Labor’s ranks, with many, including some senior Cabinet ministers, according to reports in British newspapers , worried that the party cannot win a general election under Mr. Brown.
Mr. Brown, 58, took over from Mr. Blair as prime minister last June, but after an initial surge in popularity in his early months, a deteriorating economy and a series of government mishaps have sent his personal standing, and Labor’s, into freefall.
On Friday, Mr. Brown stood his ground as he visited a Jaguar car plant in the British midlands, as he has through a succession of Labor defeats in recent months in three parliamentary by-elections, in local elections across England and Wales, and, perhaps most embarrassingly, after the stinging defeat in May of Labor’s Ken Livingstone by Conservative Boris Johnson in the mayoral election in London, long considered a Labor stronghold.
As he has for weeks, Mr. Brown cited his record as chancellor of the exchequer, or finance minister, during the 10 years of prosperity that followed Labor’s election in 1997 _ before the worldwide credit hit Britain n the past year and pushed the country close to recession.
Official statistics released on Friday showed that Britain fell to a growth rate of 0.2 per cent in the three months to June, and to an annual growth rate of 1.6 per cent, its lowest in years.
Asked if he planned to resign as prime minister, or to call an early general election, as demanded by the Conservative leader David Cameron, Mr. Brown replied:
“My task is to get on with the job of taking them through these difficult times,” he said. “I think people know there’s a global problem.”
Referring to the defeat in Glasgow, he added, “We’ve got to listen and understand and show people what we’re doing.”
Mr. Cameron, the 41-year-old Conservative leader, has revived his party’s fortunes since the 2005 party vote that made him the Tories’ fourth leader in eight years.
Although the Conservatives finished a distant third in Glasgow with only 1,639 votes, its choice of a young black woman candidate there with a trade union background, Davena Rankin, reflected the efforts Mr. Cameron has made to shift the party’s center toward groups that have historically been part of Labor’s bedrock support.
“It is truly a dreadful result for Labor and for Gordon Brown,” Mr. Cameron told reporters in Oxford. “What I wonder is whether we can really put up with this for another 18 months. I think the prime minister should take his holiday but then we should have an election.”
Even some staunch Labor supporters questioned whether Mr. Brown could recover politically after the Glasgow result.
Tony Benn, a populist left-winger who is one of the party’s elder statesmen, was dismissive of the prime minister’s assurances that he understood the difficulties that the economic slowdown was posing for ordinary people.
“If I went to a doctor and he said, ‘I share your pain, I’ve got a vision’, I’d look for another doctor,” Mr. Benn said on BBC.
But Mr. Benn said he doubted that Mr. Brown would quit, or that a scramble within the party to find a new leader, would be enough to turn the party’s fortunes around before the next election.
Challenges that have successfully unseated party leaders in Britain, including the ouster of Margaret Thatcher in 1990,- have often started with minor parliamentary figures declaring themselves as “stalking-horse” candidates for the succession, but there has been no sign of a similar challenge yet.
British political analysts generally warn against reading too much into by-election results because they do not necessarily provide an accurate gauge of the likely outcome of general elections.
But Mr. Brown has been buffeted by missteps on income tax increases for blue-collar voters and the impact of the global economic crisis which has pushed up food and fuel bills.
His supporters sought to depict Labor’s loss as a protest vote.
“If you think it is a bad result, it is a bad result,” Douglas Alexander, a Brown loyalist and cabinet minister told the BBC. “I don’t think it’s a night to say it is about one particular individual.”
But Mr. Mason, the winner in Glasgow, said his party’s triumph was “not just a political earthquake, it is off the Richter scale. It is an epic win and the tremors are being felt all the way to Downing Street.” |
