May 21, 2008	Wednesday	Jamadi-ul-Awwal 15, 1429

LONDON: It would be a miracle if Labour won the Crewe by-lection this week, and miracles will be hard to come by when Tuesday’s ICM poll shows Labour dropped by some 7 per cent in the course of a month.

A witlessly patronising anti-toff campaign will not be to blame so much as the desperate emptiness of Labour’s message. It’s not where you’re from but who you’re for that matters, and that’s the question Labour has ducked and dodged for years. Nothing Labour candidate Tamsin Dunwoody’s team did could have made a shred of difference though accusing the Tories of being soft on immigration stank. Her party needs to learn from this campaign that for long-term survival, there’s a lot to be said for going down gracefully, with convictions flying, not scratching at the inevitable with your finger nails. Visits from 100 ministers and every Labour MP will not save the day, and nor will Gordon Brown’s mystifying refusal to visit even once, while Cameron drops in almost every day.

Out there in street after street, too many people hate Labour, positively detest it. Anger both rational and completely unreasonable pours out. Elderly people who have voted Labour all their lives come out to tell Tory canvassers that even though their Labour-voting fathers would turn in their graves, they could not vote Labour this time. It’s like a run on the bank an irrational political stampede. After all, nothing dreadful has happened in the last six months apart from a bit of political bungling: everyone knows the high food, fuel and debt prices have blown in from abroad.

Eric Pickles, the shadow local government minister, is running the Tory campaign well. Crewe was only 165th on the Tory target list, so there are not many canvass returns from previous campaigns to build on. Out on the knocker, he is bluff, bulky, northern and affable, careful to wear no rosette, nor announce his party until well into a conversation. He was trying every door at random in Crewe South, which has no Tory councillors. But he had no need to prise private views from reluctant lips.

The 10p tax band abolition is the catalyst for voters who are already angry, brimming with 11 years of pent-up disappointments and grievances. People are not even bothering to be curious about Tory policies, they just want to wallop Labour, whatever the consequences. A dam seems to have burst, releasing an accumulated sludge of repressed anti-politician rage.

Why this 10p issue, over and over again? After all, the money is mostly restored, giving 22 million an unexpected bonus. Abolishing the 10p tax band doesn’t symbolise Labour, who have redirected more money to poor pensioners and children than anyone since Lloyd George. Nor is it the worst thing Labour has done: we are still mired in the Iraq war, but nobody mentioned that. Yet that 10p is the dam-buster, giving people permission to say, right, if Labour isn’t even for the poor, I have no reason left to restrain my indignation.

Of course, plenty are still loyal. Dunwoody has been canvassing only Labour stalwarts, who greeted her with fond memories of things her mother did for them. “Always Labour!” they said, and the latest ICM poll in Crewe shows 37 per cent still are. Old Crewe railwaymen tell Tory canvassers they’d rather boil their heads than vote for the party that privatised the railways. But 45 per cent tell ICM they’ll vote Conservative, sweeping away a 16 per cent Labour lead in 2005. As a national swing, Labour would lose 150 seats.

Ed Balls shows up to name a gleaming new school IT unit after Gwynneth Dunwoody. Teachers say this school consisted of tin huts that melted biro ink in summer and froze the children in winter, a temporary structure built to last 15 years still in use 50 years later until this beautiful landscaped, eco primary was rebuilt. So did they thank Labour? Several teachers I asked shrugged and pulled a face. Politics is not just about delivery, it’s about inspiring affection or at least grudging respect.

I met nurses who said they’d vote Tory because Cameron promises to set them free of bureaucracy. Labour has squandered public sector loyalty, undermined its ethos, contested and pummelled it with perpetual reform: hardly surprising the party can’t count on its support. Yet there at Eagle Bridge stands a magnificent huge new health centre just opened, with 18 GPs and myriad specialist clinics. When people ask where has the tax money gone, here’s the answer: more and better staff in buildings so fine that 10 years ago you’d have sworn they must be private, not state. But without a political message to glorify the public realm, even these don’t translate into votes.

So David Cameron in his Birmingham speech yesterday gets away with claiming Labour is “an out-of-touch political elite” of “spendaholics” on a “debt-fuelled spending spree”. He dares say out loud: “We believe low taxes are both morally right and economically efficient.” It was a cunning speech, sophisticated in recognising that restraint isn’t easy, efficiency drives are often unproductive yet promising to control spending in “a whole new culture of government”. New? Only new to those too young to remember “sharing the proceeds of growth” and “living within our means” the shabbiness, the peeling paint, the seedy parks and squalid buildings, museums charging GBP8 a go and crime figures tracking unemployment upwards. But now, says Cameron, savings will come from “tackling the causes of social problems that give rise to spending”. Drugs, debt, crime, family breakdown, worklessness, “complex and interconnected” problems, will all be solved by spending less.

Labour hopes the silken thread of Cameron’s concern for public wellbeing will unravel into a knot of its own contradictions. May be. But right now, the public has its hands over its ears, deaf to anything Labour says while shouting back in the government’s face.—Dawn/The Guardian News Service