Word: labour
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Purnell was referring to parliamentary elections due by next June, but the results of last week's municipal and European polls - a historic rout for Labour, a solid performance from the Conservatives and gains for fringe outfits including the far-right British National Party - graphically illustrated the concerns that launched Purnell's kamikaze mission. Labour's support has slumped under Brown. It has hemorrhaged support among the affluent voters of Middle England whose endorsement is essential to securing a parliamentary majority, and whom it wooed successfully in the 1990s. And it has been damaged, too, in hardscrabble industrial regions...
...Party Really Over? Still, an election must come within a year, and promises to answer a question of far more enduring significance than who should lead Labour. The issue is whether there will be a Labour Party left to lead. This isn't just about the danger of electoral wipeout, although that possibility is very real. The center-left consensus that has shaped Britain since Labour swept to power under Blair in 1997 is disintegrating, and the New Labour project that created it - the potent mix of idealism and pragmatism, of social-democratic aspirations and fiscal conservatism, of commitment...
...contact sport, every crunching tackle covered by a breathless and indefatigable national media, the bonds between the public and their elected leaders inevitably fray over time. But connecting with voters who believe politicians to be corrupt, venal and self-obsessed is an even taller order. And that is now Labour's task. The party has endured a long, slow decline, but its current crisis was triggered by one of the greatest press exposés of the modern age. It started when a former soldier and Conservative supporter called John Wicks contacted the Telegraph Media Group with a disc containing...
When William Lewis, Telegraph editor-in-chief, first looked at the material Wicks brought him, he felt "physically sick," he says. "I knew at that moment we had no option but to publish because the readers needed to know what I had just been shown." Initial coverage focused on Labour. "In the early days we took a lot of heat from senior people in the Labour government about why we were starting with them," says Lewis...
...word politician into a conversation to discover just how furious they are - but their anger is of the slow-burning, passive-aggressive variety of a people who wear socks with sandals. All the mainstream parties encountered hostility on the doorstep as they campaigned for last week's elections, but Labour, as the party of government, was perceived to carry the heaviest responsibility. "When we talk about the end of New Labour - and it is the end of New Labour if it hadn't died already - what really has gone on is that the country has said...