Excerpts from an editorial in The Guardian (UK) yesterday:
For Gordon Brown, the future is more certain than it might seem. Whatever happens this summer, his prime ministership is likely to come to an end within two years. This may happen at the hands of his own party. It may happen at a general election. It may even come if, resigned to his failure and his fate, Brown decides to walk away. Yesterday's bleak result from Glasgow East made this reality more obvious but otherwise hardly changed it; he is a prime minister being rejected by his country and he must feel it.
The result in Glasgow was of course very bad - but a narrow victory would have been awful too, though Labour would have been less frightened by that. No refuge can be found in the oddities of by-election campaigns or in low turnout. Nor is there comfort in pointing out that Scotland is different from England. Labour has lost every election of every sort in every place that it has fought this year. Glasgow traced a pattern set by Boris Johnson in London. If anything like this happened at the next general election, Labour would be reduced to its bastions; isolated red rocks all but washed away by a blue tide.
If the party accepts that the signposts pointing to defeat are clear and that the opposition is consequently a more substantial force than the gang of shallow showmen that Brown believes it to be, then there are two ways to respond. The party must rescue Brown or remove him. Either would be better than the sullen acceptance of oblivion on which Labour will otherwise settle. Ministers can blame the economy and they have a point: No government would be thriving in the face of the 22 percent rise in gas bills announced yesterday. But circumstances do not explain it all.
What might happen if Brown remained, as is probable? He may not win, but Labour would keep its self-respect as a party that did not panic but stuck loyally to what it believed in - and to its leader.
