A perceptive analysis of the reason Labour is most unlikely to recover in the short term. Trust has gone.
Christina Speight
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13.6.09
Voters are giving up on Labour because it gave up on them
Mass immigration and closer EU integration have no public support, says Jeff Randall
Imagine the scene. It's late and the lights are out in Downing Street – except for a lamp burning on the Prime Minister's desk. Alone, brooding, he stares at a political map of the United Kingdom in the aftermath of the European elections. The colour red appears to have been rubbed out.
Of the 15.6 million people who voted, 84.3 per cent did not put a cross in Labour's box. How dare they! Who are these 13,244,063 ingrates? Right across southern England, from Penzance in Cornwall to Margate in Kent, more than 90 per cent of the electorate rejected the party of Gordon Brown. Even in Labour's redoubts of Scotland and Wales, close to 80 per cent turned away.
Worse still, Ukip, the party of Nigel Farage, a booze-and-fags-loving habitué of London's clubland, was preferred to the weary collective that clings to Mr Brown's presbyterian conscience. Mr Farage is an engaging maverick who says the Prime Minister "devalued democracy" by ramming through the Lisbon Treaty. Britain's increasingly Eurosceptic voters seem to agree.
For a ruling party at Westminster, this was close to humiliation. Having told us that he had saved the world, Mr Brown was unable to save face on home turf. As the horror show developed through Sunday night and into Monday, there began a desperate search for excuses. The Prime Minister and his coterie of sycophants plunged into their lunchbox of red herrings, porkie pies and cheesy one-liners, hoping to distract us from the real reasons for Labour's drubbing.
First to be blamed were MPs who had fiddled while their homes earned. "It was the expenses scandal," shrieked Agent Harman, the Opposition's secret weapon inside Labour's high command. Of course it was, dear, except that The Daily Telegraph's exposé of moat clearances, duck islands and the double-claiming of husband-and-wife MPs had shown many Tories to be equally shameless.
Alistair Darling, the Big Borrower, fingered his party's poor communications. "We need to explain ourselves better," he said. "We need to set out clearly what we are for." Wrong again. His problem was that Labour had explained itself too well – and we, the coping classes, were appalled.
Voters had not failed to understand Labour's offer; quite the reverse. On Europe, they saw through Mr Brown's plan to dilute even further Britain's sovereignty, caving in to Brussels, while circumventing our views.
In a recent YouGov poll for The Economist, the proportion of people who thought that Britain's membership of the European Union was a good thing was down to 31 per cent, from 43 per cent 25 years ago. Those who saw it as a bad thing rose in the same period from 30 per cent to 37 per cent. Support for loosening Britain's ties jumped from 36 per cent to 51 per cent, and those in favour of complete withdrawal rose from 12 per cent to 21 per cent. With Labour refusing to listen, frustrated voters happily embraced Ukip.
Then there is the British National Party. Its success – two MEPs and votes equal to 39 per cent of Labour's total – is the story with which Mr Brown's message machine struggles most. It refuses to confront the reality that many decent people, who are not xenophobic but feel under siege by alien cultures, want an end to mass immigration before the melting pot boils over.
In a different YouGov poll, this one for the Cross Party Group on Balanced Migration, 35 per cent cited immigration as an issue that influenced their voting decisions. That compares with 12 per cent for the NHS, 12 per cent for crime and seven per cent for education. The Cross Party Group cannot be dismissed as a bunch of racists. It includes Lord Ahmed (the United Kingdom's first Muslim life peer), Lord Carey (the former Archbishop of Canterbury) and Lord Skidelsky (a politics professor at Warwick University).
The group's joint spokesmen, Nicholas Soames MP and Frank Field MP, urged the main parties to stop ducking the issue and "respond to strong and well-justified public opinion". But how can Labour do this? As the architect of a policy that has dismantled border controls and allowed a quadrupling of net inward migration since 1997, it would have to admit to a catastrophic error. That will not happen because, as we know, Mr Brown doesn't do contrition.
Very few British people are happy with the prospect of immigration adding seven million to our population by 2028. We were never consulted; it was foisted upon us. This is the democratic deficit that the BNP exploits.
In a well-timed report for the think tank Civitas, Mervyn Stone, professor of statistics at University College London, accuses the Government of "sidelining honesty and truth in some of its major policy-making decisions". Bingo!
He highlights the "research", if it can be so dignified, that led the Home Office in 2004 to predict between 5,000 and 13,000 arrivals a year from the EU's eight new nations. In fact, 600,000 turned up within the first 24 months.
Many are hard-working, skilled people who contribute to the economy, but that's not the point. We, the British people, were conned by a duplicitous administration that talks about "listening to what voters have to say", but has no intention of taking any notice. As its authority crumbles, Labour's leadership is resorting to what George Orwell called "political language". This, he said, was "designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind".
Mr Brown exuded another blast of hot air this week when inviting voters to distinguish between Labour's future "investment" in public spending and Tory "cuts", after shadow health secretary Andrew Lansley admitted the need for targeted budget reductions to restore financial sanity. In effect, the Prime Minister was trying to repeat the scare tactic that had worked so well for Labour at the last election in 2005, ie the Tories will obliterate our public services.
Aside from the fact that after 2011, when inflation and debt interest payments are factored in, Labour's own plans will necessitate a seven per cent cut, about £26 billion at today's prices, it was Mr Brown's use of the word "investment" that was so telling. In truth, much of Labour's spending is naked consumption, money burned in the pursuit of votes, with no return for the taxpayer.
When Margaret Thatcher was at Number 10, an MP who had studied several prime ministers told The Observer: "You see, they all go mad, they all start hearing voices… they are cut off from the real world." After almost exactly two years in the job, Mr Brown has joined that club. While the sound of an unhappy electorate is ignored, the voices in his head are coming over loud and clear.
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