This week’s other victory
In all the euphoria over the election of Barack Obama in the United States (and I share that excitement big time), we political observers in Britain should not overlook the significance of the Labour Party victory in Thursday’s Glenrothes by-election.
Not only was the victory unexpected even by Labour itself, it is the first by-election since February 1997 when Labour has both increased its share of the vote(by 3%) and won the seat. Since taking office in May 1997, there have been only three other occasions when Labour has increased its share and on each of those occasions Labour came second.
The Scottish National Party will claim that they lost because Labour hit hard (and, in the SNP view, unfairly) on the single issue of the local council’s introduction of large home care charges – and there may be something in that. But the significance of the setback to the SNP was underlined by Labour’s victories in two local council by-elections the same day.
It was a personal triumph for Prime Minister Gordon Brown: he broke with convention by visiting the by-election twice and his wife Sarah made repeated visits. Brown’s personal position had strengthened since the economic crisis and this by-election victory underlines and reinforces that.
It is tempting to try to make some comparison between the Obama and the Brown victories. No doubt the Conservatives will hail Obama’s success as showing that voters want a fresh young face (and so they should vote for David Cameron). On the other hand, Obama and Brown have much more in common ideologically than Obama and Cameron. Obama and Brown both see government more as part of the solution rather than as simply the problem and they should work well together in tackling the international consequences of the global financial crisis.
It’s been a good week for those on us on the Centre-Left.