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Who lost this election for Labour?

The British establishment, led by the BBC and aided by some inside the Labour Party, are plotting Gordon Brown’s downfall.

They want Labour’s leader out.

The grounds?  That the 2010 election result compares badly with Tony Blair’s electoral victories.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

Between 1997 and 2005 Tony Blair lost the Labour Party 3.9 million voters.

13.5 million had voted for Labour in 1997 – in good faith. By 2005 this had plummeted to 9.6 million. This brutal political bloodletting took place during ‘the good times’ – when Britain was growing at 3% per annum – and well before the biggest financial crisis in British history.

Then, just as Gordon Brown took over the premiership, ‘the world economy fell off a cliff’.

Economic failure, unemployment and the failure to rein in bankers cost Brown’s government about 900,000 votes last week. But that was fully 3 million votes less than were lost during the good times under Tony Blair.

In other words Labour’s lost voters were lost long before 6th May, 2010.

They were lost by the establishment’s favoured son and Gordon Brown’s predecessor: Tony Blair.

One Comment

  1. Mellie Agon says:

    Ann Pettifor is right. Labour was already losing millions of voters. You can’t blame it all on Brown. It is the fault of the right-wing policies pursued by the Blairite leadership, which have alienated the party’s supporters more and more since 1997.

    That said, if Brown had moved to the left to win back the party’s support, we wouldn’t be getting David Cameron for Prime Minister.

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