{"id":933,"date":"2008-05-23T12:11:34","date_gmt":"2008-05-23T11:11:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/wordpress\/?p=933"},"modified":"2008-05-23T12:11:34","modified_gmt":"2008-05-23T11:11:34","slug":"crewe-derails-new-labour-project","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/?p=933","title":{"rendered":"Crewe derails New Labour project"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>For Labour, <a href=\"http:\/\/news.bbc.co.uk\/1\/hi\/uk_politics\/7415362.stm\">the result<\/a> of the Crewe and Nantwich by-election was about as bad as it could be. Just weeks after Labour&#8217;s poorest local election results in 40 years, the Parliamentary by-election saw a Labour majority of 7,078 turned into a Conservative majority of 7,860  &#8211; a 17.6% swing from the 2005 General Election. The pressure group Compass has <a href=\"http:\/\/www.compassonline.org.uk\/article.asp?n=1980\">this analysis<\/a> of the lessons from Crewe.<br \/>\nSome political commentators are pointing out that this is first Conservative gain from Labour in a by-election for 30 years. In Ilford North in March 1978, the swing was only 7%. I remember Ilford North well.<br \/>\nIn those days, I thought that I wanted to be a Labour MP (I had already fought the two General Elections of 1974) and I went for the Labour candidacy in the by-election. I attended nine meetings involving the selection, I won three nominations and was shortlisted with five others, but the chosen candidate was Tessa Jowell who lost the by-election but went on to a successful Ministerial career which continues to this day.<br \/>\nSuch is life &#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>For Labour, the result of the Crewe and Nantwich by-election was about as bad as it could be. Just weeks after Labour&#8217;s poorest local election results in 40 years, the Parliamentary by-election saw a Labour majority of 7,078 turned into a Conservative majority of 7,860 &#8211; a 17.6% swing from the 2005 General Election. The [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-933","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-british-current-affairs"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/933","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=933"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/933\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=933"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=933"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=933"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}