MELANIE PHILLIPS: Labour is finished, whoever is leader. So isn't it time the Tories set out what they really stand for?
Last updated at 1:54 AM on 28th July 2008
Labour is in turmoil. The Scottish National Party's by-election victory in Glasgow East, hitherto the third safest Labour seat in Scotland and one of the most solid in the country, has produced feverish talk that a leadership challenge to Gordon Brown is now a certainty.
The piranha pool otherwise known as the Parliamentary Labour Party is now a blur of thrashing predators, some raising their jaws from the bloodied waters only to declare, as did Harriet Harman yesterday, that there are no plots against the Prime Minister and Labour is just getting on with governing the country.
Well, that would be a first.
It's the fact that Labour is so patently failing to govern the country which makes all the speculation over who will replace Mr Brown largely beside the point.
For Labour's meltdown is not principally the result of his premiership.
It is more that an entire flock of political chickens - some of which Mr Brown himself helped release as Chancellor - have now come home to roost.
What we are looking at is the implosion of the New Labour project itself.
In typically weasel fashion, ministers are blaming the Government's unpopularity on the economic downturn. Certainly, rises in food and fuel prices have played a large part - although it is clearly preposterous for ministers to pretend that Britain's economic woes have nothing to do with them.
But this is by no means the whole story.
In Glasgow East there was the particular issue of Scottish nationalism.
When the Labour Government introduced devolution, people said this would put rocket fuel behind the push for Scottish independence. Ministers scornfully brushed this aside.
Was Scotland not their very own fiefdom and power base? Now they have the answer to such arrogance.
With consummate skill Alex Salmond, the SNP leader of the Scottish Parliament, has exploited resentment and grievances north of the border to ratchet up the cause of an independent Scotland.
The collapse of Labour both nationally and locally into incompetence and sleaze has fuelled a perception among the Scots that, with the SNP appearing to offer a clean and competent alternative, there is no need for them to put up with useless Labour any more.
It is, however, exceedingly unlikely that the electors of Glasgow East were voting for Scottish independence.
They were simply turning their backs on the Labour Party which had so badly let them down
If any group of people represents the very core of what Labour is supposed to be about, it is surely the inhabitants of Glasgow East which contains some of the poorest areas in the entire country.
But their wretched circumstances are in large measure due to Labour policies which have kept them dependent upon the state and in a poverty which is as much moral and spiritual as well as economic.
Why should such people continue to vote for a party which gives them no hope? Why should they put up any more with politicians who had taken them for granted for so long?
At least the SNP bothered to knock on their doors and inquire whether they might vote for it.
Although the previous MP, David Marshall, resigned on health grounds, the talking point in the constituency was the unproven claim that he had wrongly used his Commons expenses to pay members of his family.
Whatever the truth of that, the fact is that Labour nationally has been embroiled in one financial scandal after another, making deals with its super-rich cronies and with MPs' snouts firmly in the trough at public expense.
It is such behaviour by a party that so sanctimoniously takes the moral high ground, along with its arrogance and endemic incompetence, that has turned so many against it in such profound and irredeemable disgust.
In short, the rotten borough of Glasgow East was a technicolour microcosm of the moral and political bankruptcy of the entire New Labour project.
And that is hardly likely to be addressed by the removal of Mr Brown.
True, his premiership has been disastrous. He has no fresh vision for the country except a resumption of class war.
But, in truth, the wheels visibly came off this government under Tony Blair when, many months before he finally departed from Downing Street, his closest advisers peeled away one by one saying in despair that the New Labour project had failed.
We see the evidence all around us in astounding rates of illiteracy, filthy hospitals, chronic public transport and rising violent crime.
We have seen billions of pounds wasted through public maladministration and we have been insulted year in, year out by the same old excuses and evasions.
In short, we know that both New Labour and Old Labour have failed. The game is up.
We want a new start, proper leadership, a fresh vision.
We are unlikely to get these from yet another Labour leader.
The big question, however, is: who will deliver them?
It was, of course, the wretchedness of the Easterhouse area in Glasgow East that impelled Iain Duncan Smith to formulate his own vision of social justice based on an end to state dependency and the restoration of individual responsibility.
The Tory leadership has embraced many of his ideas.
But on the really big things, it is still not delivering a clear alternative to the Left-wing programme it once thought it had to go along with to gain power.
What are the Tories saying, for example, about the fundamental onslaught upon the integrity and identity of the United Kingdom posed by both devolution and our membership of the EU, which aims to reduce nations to regions controlled from the centre by the super-state of Euroland? They are silent.
What are they saying about Labour's ruinous levels of public spending? Pledging to match them.
What are they saying about the obsession with global warming which has produced ruinous policies on land use which have pushed up the cost of food? They share it.
Far from providing a clear and principled alternative, the new model Tories still defer too much to fashionable opinion; are still terrified of offending that opinion - particularly in the BBC; and are still following rather than leading.
That's why, although they are clearly benefiting from the collapse of belief in the Government, they have yet to ensure that voters believe in them instead.
Looking in vain for a clear alternative, voters conclude that 'they're all as bad as each other'.
The result is a profound disaffection with the whole of mainstream politics.
That provides fringe parties with their golden opportunity - which is why in Scotland the SNP is doing so spectacularly well.
But this is a really dangerous situation.
For the belief that 'no one in the mainstream speaks for me' gives rise to the kind of extremist politics that turns one section of the community against another.
The nationalist protest vote that is increasingly troublesome north of the border may take even more unsavoury tribal shape in England.
Every so often, a deep shift in the political climate takes place.
It happened in 1979 with the rise of Margaret Thatcher; it happened in 1997 with the rise of Tony Blair; it's happening again now.
The problem is that, while people know what has fallen, they are not sure what if anything has risen in its place.
It is a vacuum which spells danger, not just for the beleaguered Mr Brown but for us all.
As a born and bred Londoner and a Brit, I despise them
