Election disaster likely to be the end for Brown

May 5 2008 Agenda By Chris Game

As he reflects on Labour's disaster at the polls, the Prime Minister would do well to try and restore integrity to the electoral process says Chris Game.

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I suppose it's as unreasonable to expect originality from tired-out newspaper headline writers as from turfed-out politicians. Certainly, Thursday's election results had both groups struggling.

Labour ministers - even Gordon Brown, who found the whole debacle merely "disappointing" - were going to listen, learn, heed our concerns, show contrition, feel our pain; anything but go, although that's the message my own listening suggested many electors were sending.

Headline writers found it equally hard to get past "May Day Massacre" - except for one of our own Birmingham papers that pleasingly produced "Blue Murder in the Heartlands". An interesting choice of phrase.

It was intended simply to convey the extent to which the Conservatives were wiping out Labour councils and councillors right across the West Midlands. The phrase apparently derives, though, from the French curse "morbleu" - blue death - "bleu" being a substitute for "dieu" or God. And to scream blue murder means to indicate fright or alarm, rather than real danger.

Hmm. My personal assessment is that what happened to Labour on Thursday is more accurately described as dire than disappointing, and as potentially mortally dangerous rather than just alarming. The murder could well be real - the murder of the whole New Labour project.

Nationally, Labour won 331 fewer seats and nine fewer councils than in 2004, previously the party's worst local electoral performance in recent years, when their estimated share of the national vote fell to 26 per cent against the Conservatives' 37 per cent. On Thursday Labour's vote share dropped to 24 per cent, behind the Lib Dems' 25 per cent, and no fewer than 20 points behind the Conservatives' 44 per cent.

Grabbing at straws, some Labour politicians point out that the Conservatives, in their most desperate years in the mid-1990s, were 22 points adrift of Labour, who in 1995 achieved an estimated 47 per cent of the national vote. And in Birmingham they will recall years in which the Conservatives didn't win a single council seat outside Sutton, when they were reduced to just 13 members of the council, and Labour outnumbered them nearly 7 to 1.

And it's true. Across the 17 councils in our table, Labour's 285 seats, though about 50 fewer than a week ago, are at least double the

number the Conservatives held in 1996. The Labour Party today, the argument goes, is nothing like as weak as John Major's Conservatives were before going down to their record General Election defeat in 1997.

The point is, though, that New Labour didn't need its record win or its massively bloated Commons majority - in fact might have been better without it - and nor does David Cameron. His Conservatives could secure a comfortable working majority with about a half of Thursday's 20 per cent lead, and could kick out a Labour Government with one of perhaps six per cent - for which they are now very definitely on course, not least in the West Midlands.

Remarkably, considering their already strong baseline, the Conservatives gained majority, minority or likely power-sharing control on no fewer than an additional five of the 17 councils in our table. Solihull is hardly unused to Conservative administrations, but Redditch and Wyre Forest were both Labour dominated ten years ago, and weren't Conservative-run once throughout the Thatcher/Major era, yet they are today.

But Wolverhampton and Nuneaton & Bed-worth are electorally at least as significant, for they show the Conservatives making real progress in traditional Labour areas that have been so resistant to them in their gradual revival since 1997.

The Conservatives have a way to go yet, especially in the several towns and cities, not only in the north, where they are still completely unrepresented - Manchester, Liverpool, Newcastle-upon-Tyne, Sheffield, Gateshead, Knowsley, Oxford, Cambridge. But when the gains in our region are added to other similar

councils they won on Thursday, there's no way they can any longer be dismissed as unelectable. In fact, you might say that, over the same weekend, the situations of Labour and Birmingham City Football Club have taken a similar course. Both have largely lost control of their own destinies. If they do avoid their respective disasters, it will be through others making bigger mistakes than they do.

All of which means that we probably have two years to wait until the next General Election - ample time for the Government to do what it should have done before the last election and reform the system of electoral registration so as to remove its vulnerability to large-scale fraud.

You might think that the 2005 Birmingham election court produced evidence enough for reform to have been well in place by now. The presiding judge, Richard Mawrey, certainly did, observing that the combination of household registration and postal voting on demand enabled - indeed invited - practices "that would disgrace a banana republic".

Rather than reform the process, however, an unchastened Prime Minister called an early General Election on the very next day.

Hence Judge Mawrey's reiterated warnings, following another recent case involving a Slough Conservative councillor, of how fraud remains "childishly easy to commit and very

difficult to detect. To ignore the probability that it is widespread, particularly in local elections, is a policy that even an ostrich would despise".

The catalyst for ministers, though, seems not to have been the ever-quotable judge, but the timely Rowntree Reform Trust study discussed by Paul Dale in last Monday's Post. Entitled Purity of Elections in the UK, the study is a catalogue of their impurities.

Asked about the study's overwhelmingly critical evidence, Justice ministers assured MPs that they are "committed to ensuring that all people have confidence in the electoral system" - which demonstrably they are not - and that they are "looking at" the case for individual registration.

For goodness sake: we've done "looking at". We don't need another open-ended Brown-initiated inquiry. The Government has been repeatedly told what's needed: individual registration, requiring signature, date of birth, and National Insurance number or the equivalent; photographic ID to be produced at polling stations; postal vote applications to contain the personal identification data required on registration, and postal voter lists open to public inspection. Much, in fact, as was introduced in Northern Ireland six years ago.

It may not be quite the inspirational message the Prime Minister is looking for right now, but, if you're going to be defeated, there is surely something to be said for losing through a process into which you've tried to restore a bit of the integrity your predecessor destroyed.

* Chris Game is lecturer at the Institute of Local Government Studies, University of Birmingham.