Labour's suicide

While the media and political pundits endlessly debate the spending cuts outlined by Gordon Brown at the TUC yesterday, the real catastrophe - the ongoing suicide of the Labour party - is being given less attention.

To be sure, job losses are bad news - and Brown's inability to satisfactorily articulate his plans for scaling back the nation's debt are giving the Tories and the Lib Dems all the ammunition they need as the next general election looms.

But the real problem with Brown is that he is simply not taken seriously by Labour voters - his own foot soldiers - whose desertion to other parties will hit the party hard at the next general election. These foot soldiers include low-income earners and trade unions associates - once the bedrock of Labour support and still a key financial lifeline to the party. When Labour announced it was scrapping the 10p tax rate last year, the party rightly faced a barrage of criticism for abandoning its core voters and, more importanty, its core values.

At the heart of Labour's decline is this abandonment of key bastions of support. Brown must surely acknowledge his political time is nearly up, with the Conservatives breathing down his neck in all polls and members of his government relentlessly plotting against him. But he displays a staggering inability to acknowledge the resentment felt by a large percentage of Labour voters at many of the policies he champions.

When he promises to "cut costs, cut inefficiencies, cut unnecessary programmes and cut lower priority budgets", there is a collective wince among Labour troops, becuause they know, instinctively, that these "cuts" refer to underhand economic tactics which punish those at the bottom of the pile and do little to restrict the obscene salaries raked in by those at the top. When Brown was looking to shore up middle class support last year, it was the 10p tax band that aided lower income people that was first up for the guillotine.

But Labour is apparently unwilling to confront this reality. The uneasy "coalition" of New Labour that was elected in 1997 was skewed decidedly in favour of "Middle England". If yesterday's speech is anything to go by, it is Middle England that still holds Brown enthralled. He is afraid of a backlash - but if he does not pay attention to his rank and file, he may find Labour's meltdown and bitter division at the next election more devastating that any poll can predict.