The Good Old Days
/Peter Riddell: Never mind the numbers, it’s the mood swing that reveals the true picture
There is a deep resentment of New Labour and it goes well beyond the fairly recent economic problems. It predates Brown but is coming to a head precisely because many people see that Brown was nothing more than a continuation of Blair, despite the rhetoric. In many ways Brown is worse than Blair. In the end we all knew that Blair had no real beliefs, beyond self-advancement. But Brown actually believes in what he's doing and that, I'm afraid, will be his downfall. He believes. The rest of us don't. End of story.
In many ways, what we saw yesterday was a return to normal: a governing party losing out to the main opposition party — just as happened when Labour was last in power in the Sixties and Seventies. From 1966 to 1970, the Tories gained as many as twelve seats from Labour, and other parties captured two... In the 1966-70 parliament, the swings varied enormously, from 8.5 to 21.2 per cent. Even on the same day, in March 1968, when the Tories won three seats from Labour (Acton, Dudley and Meriden), the swings varied between 15.1 and 21.2 per cent.Peter Riddell has been around for a long time, maybe too long. What happened forty years ago has absolutely no relevance to the present political scene and you'd have to be at least 63 now to have voted back in 1966. Labour and Conservative weren't even the same political parties back then (except for the names of course), and the same goes for the Lib-Dems, come to that.
There is a deep resentment of New Labour and it goes well beyond the fairly recent economic problems. It predates Brown but is coming to a head precisely because many people see that Brown was nothing more than a continuation of Blair, despite the rhetoric. In many ways Brown is worse than Blair. In the end we all knew that Blair had no real beliefs, beyond self-advancement. But Brown actually believes in what he's doing and that, I'm afraid, will be his downfall. He believes. The rest of us don't. End of story.
