Would election loss turn out the lights on Labour?

Oct 4 2009 by Michael Kelly, Sunday Sun

IF Labour loses the next election it may never come to power again. That’s the doomsday scenario of a left-leaning political thinktank which is no friend of the Tories. So are Labour’s days really numbered? Mike Kelly reports . . .

IN the first few weeks of Gordon Brown’s premiership the prospect of Labour winning a fourth General Election seemed almost inevitable.

Now, not only do the chances of a Labour victory at the next General Election seem remote, but it has been said the party will never come to power again.

That is the conclusion of the influential left wing thinktank Compass which argues Labour could face an attack on three fronts by a victorious Tory party that could see its seats in Parliament cut from the present 349 to about 130.

Firstly, there is a greater chance of Scottish independence if the Tories, who are less popular north of the border, came to power. A breakaway would strip Labour of its 41 Scottish seats.

Secondly, David Cameron’s plan to cut the number of MPs by 10 per cent is predicted to hit Labour hardest. Of the 60 or more seats to go, it is estimated that 45 would be Labour because the biggest reduction will be in areas which have seen falls in population, including Labour strongholds in Wales and the industrial heartlands.

Finally, planned Tory reforms to party funding would, Compass believes, break the historic link between Labour and the trade unions and further destabilise an organisation which is heavily in debt and has a sharply declining membership base.

Its report called The Last Labour Government says: “These three factors could then combine to ensure that an already intellectually and organisationally weak party fails to ever recover.”

After a Labour party conference overshadowed by the Sun newspaper withdrawing its support for Brown, the run up to the next election has already started.

But according to Dr Lawrence Black, a political expert at Durham University, reports of Labour’s potential demise are a little premature.

He said: “I think what they are trying to do is frighten people into voting Labour. I remember after the 1992 General Election when Neil Kinnock lost to John Major an awful lot of political commentators said Labour would never win again. Yet five years later they did, with the biggest political landslide since 1832.

“Politics is very fluid. It’s hard to predict something that will happen with such certainty.”