Jack Straw's obvious announcement that he is standing down has distracted attention from David Miliband's. South Shields splits fifty-fifty between Newcastle and Sunderland, and he has now, in the week leading up to a derby, decided to take sides.
While a certain number of the Muslims in Blackburn must be blind, I doubt that they all are. They have been electing Jack Straw since 1979. And while a certain number of the Muslims in Oldham East & Saddleworth must be blind, I doubt that they all are. They have just elected Debbie Abrahams, whose name is not Straw, but Abrahams.
Yesterday, in what had been a three-way marginal, practically half of electors turned out in a by-election, they gave Labour the same sort of majority - not merely in percentage terms, but in actual votes - as in 1997. Imagine if every seat had the same result as in 1997. And the Conservatives collapsed. (As, by the way, did the BNP, previously quite strong there.) All under Ed - have you got that? Ed - Miliband.
This is what 1997 would have looked like if John Smith had lived. There was never, ever any need for Tony Blair, and he had no impact on any General Election result until 2005, when he lost Labour 100 seats that it would otherwise have held, thus transforming himself from a mere irrelevance into a positive liability. Exactly as David Miliband would have been.
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Mister Lindsay, I don't agree with your conclusions. I lived in Saddleworth for some years and I can say, with some confidence, that there are very few Muslims there.
ReplyDeletePrior to Tony Blair's appearance on the political scene anything could have happened. John Smith lacked charisma. Along came a knight in shining armour. Yes indeed, Tony Blair had huge appeal and made a difference to the labour vote. Subsequent events have reduced his popularity. Neverthless, he was a once in a life time politician.
Shortly after TB came to prominence I was part of a quiz team. We called ourselves 'The Blairites' Middle-class, university educated and completely besotted. I'm sure some of those fans would prefer to forget their besottedness. But it was. And Blair was a powerful force. What a long way he has fallen.
But there are lots of Muslims in Oldham. The Conservatives banked on keeping their vote in Saddleworth and bet on picking up Pakistani Muslim votes in Oldham by selecting a Pakistani Mulsim candidate, with Baroness Warsi even delivering speeches there in Urdu.
ReplyDeleteBut they lost the Saddleworth vote while failing to pick up the Oldham one. The story here is not their collapse in a place like Oldham, but, far more ominously for them, their collapse in a place like Saddleworth.
After the death of John Smith, those who seized control of the Labour Party erased the fact that the combined Labour and SDP votes had been larger than the Conservative vote both in 1983 and in 1987. Such people still deny outright that the opinion poll rating that was the 1997 result had not varied since Golden Wednesday, 16th September 1992. There were swings of 1997 proportions in the European Elections just after Smith's death, i.e., under the leadership of Margaret Beckett.
Among those of us who have been active in the Labour Party in County Durham, it is common knowledge that Blair had been about to announce his departure from Parliament at the General Election then expected to be called in 1996, but Smith's death changed his mind, at least conditional on his victory in the consequent Leadership Election.
But do not try and tell that to these people, who include David Cameron and those around him. Instead of the verifiable facts above, they would have us believe that the 1997 "victory" was all the work of their own archetype of those who did best, ostensibly, out of both the 1960s and the 1980s.