The scale of Labour’s defeat

Alex Barker at the FT’s Westminster blog rattles off a series of facts to show just how bad things are for Labour, where Brown has led them to. This trio are particularly devastating:

“Labour is now the third party of local government in England, with fewer councillors than the Liberal Democrats for the first time since the First World War

Labour secured the lowest vote share ever recorded by a serving government in both elections

Labour fell under 20 per cent vote share for the first time since 1910, when the party was four years old” It is, as Labour showed in the 1980s and the Tories more recently, very hard for one of the two main parties to destroy itself. But if Brown continues, that might become a possibility. It is not only his disastrous leadership that is the problem for Labour but that every day the party accepts his continuing leadership it demonstrates how out of touch it is with public opinion.