Britain’s governing Labour Party slumped to a humiliating fifth place in a worse-than-expected by-election result yesterday, in a new poll blow exactly a year after Prime Minister Gordon Brown took office.
Although Labour was never expected to win the seat of Henley, southern England, the scale of the loss was a surprise, with Labour losing its deposit as vote share fell more than 11.5 percent on the last general election in 2005.
The main opposition Conservative Party retained the safe seat vacated by Boris Johnson when he became London Mayor on May 1 by a comfortable 10,116 majority over the Liberal Democrats, slightly down on 2005.
The Green Party and the far-right British National Party were ahead of Labour, which garnered just more than 1,066 votes, or short of the 5 percent threshold to retain its deposit.
Labour’s candidate drew about 800 votes more than Bananaman Owen, from the fringe Monster Raving Loony Party, which has been an off-the-wall feature in British elections since the early 1980s.
Member of Parliament Martin Salter described it as a “grim result” for Labour.
“I am very disappointed. We did hope to do better than that,” he said.
“It is very difficult to divine a clear message for Gordon Brown in a seat in which we had no chance at all. It is one of the worst seats for Labour in the country,” he said.
The winner, John Howell, said the result showed that Labour was “falling apart and that the Conservatives under David Cameron’s leadership are on the march.”
However they console themselves, the result will make depressing reading for Brown and his colleagues, after a year in which they have seen support hemorrhage from healthy highs to record lows.
It coincided with a YouGov/Daily Telegraph poll yesterday putting Labour 18 points behind the Tories, with 61 percent of voters rating Brown as an electoral liability.
Some 67 percent of voters believed the Conservatives would win the next general election, which is scheduled no later than May 2010, while just 16 percent believed Labour would be returned for the fourth time since 1997.
The Tories have had several major successes in recent months, polling well in local elections in England and Wales on May 1, and winning a formerly safe Labour seat in a by-election on May 22.
Brown was initially lauded for proposing constitutional reform, apparently cooling relations with the US and providing a measured response to a series of crises that hit Britain in the weeks after he became prime minister.
But the former chancellor of the exchequer’s reputation for sound economic management has since taken a damaging hit from the near-collapse of the Northern Rock bank and his government’s botched income tax reforms. The government also faced accusations of incompetence after the repeated loss of sensitive personal documents.
Brown’s supporters insist he is still the right man for the job, praising his integrity and serious-minded attempts at reform, blaming external factors for the government’s dip in fortunes.
But critics blame him personally for the economic slowdown, increased taxes, higher government borrowing, the rising cost of fuel, domestic energy and food and fall in the house prices.
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