Just when you think it can’t get any worse for Gordon Brown, it does. New Labour has succeeded in losing the Glasgow East by-election. Glasgow East is a solid working class area with one of the finest labour movement traditions on the country. (See: The Glasgow East by-election and memories of Red Clydeside). It has been a Labour heartland for generations.

The Scottish National Party won the seat by 365 votes. Labour previously had a majority of 13,000 in the 2005 general election. Glasgow East was the third safest seat in Scotland, a country which is largely a Tory-free zone. How did they manage to lose the support of the voters? It’s not the attraction of nationalism – not yet, at any rate. The voters are sending Labour a message, ‘change or you’ll be wiped out.’

The SNP candidate was understandably delighted. “This SNP victory is not just a political earthquake; it is off the Richter scale. It is an epic win and the tremors will be felt all the way to Downing Street”, he declared. Though we know better, the SNP presents itself with a left face in Scottish cities. The swing against Labour in Glasgow was 22%. That’s worse than the shock Crewe by-election in May, where the swing was 18%.

The defeat represents the final nail in the coffin for the strategy of New Labour. Gordon Brown comes across with burbling incoherence when asked what his government’s vision is. There is a reason for this, apart from his lack of communication skills. The strategy worked out by Blair, Brown and Mandelson after the 1992 general election defeat was as follows. New Labour could completely ignore the interests of the working class. They had nowhere else to turn apart from Labour. The results of elections, they argued, were determined by a handful of swing voters in marginal constituencies. It was necessary to water down Labour’s policies so as to get these people in the bag. Go easy on the ‘vision’ thing. The way to defeat the Tories was by appearing as much like the Tories as possible! The technical term for this tactic is triangulation.

Actually the tactic failed at its first test. Blair expected to win the 1997 election narrowly, by 30 seats or so. In fact a wave of anti-Tory feeling engulfed the country, including traditionally Tory areas and carried Blair into Number Ten by a landslide. The mood was overwhelmingly for change.

New Labour has been careful in government to pour cold water on this mood for change, continuing with mainly Thatcher.ite policies. As a result they’ve lost between five and six million votes in the general elections since their 1997 high water mark – working class abstentions. Now the other side of the strategy of triangulation has come to haunt New Labour. ‘The working class has nowhere else to go,’ it was argued. They don’t have to go anywhere. They can sit at home and not bother to vote. In Scotland, they can vote SNP as a protest – it’s not like voting Tory, they tell themselves.

Glasgow East shows the complete failure of New Labour tactics as a means of winning elections, which was its sole reason for existence. Labour betrays every principle it has ever stood for and then loses elections. Glasgow East shows it loses elections precisely because it has torn up its principles, and working class voters are disgusted by it.

In particular the result shows that abolition of the 10p income tax rate, which hit the low paid, continues to rankle. Yet this was Brown’s brainchild. Last year he proposed to reduce the standard rate of income tax, making things better for the well-to-do by abolishing the 10p rate - at the expense of 5 million low paid workers. The proposal hit home last April. Characteristically Brown maintains a guilty, grumpy silence on the reason for the decision. Hangers on have suggested that he didn’t understand that the measure would rob the poor. If that really is the case, then he is too stupid to be a government minister. Certainly John McDonnell was warning loud and clear that abolition of the 10p rate would hurt the worst off. Millions of people, including millions of people who would personally benefit from the tax change, exploded in anger. The measure outraged their sense of fairness. ‘Fair’, of course, is not a word in the New Labour lexicon. Actually Brown was chortling when he announced the measure in parliament last year. He was so clever! He was out-Torying the Tories. This squalid political manoeuvre has brought a wave of disgust against Brown and New Labour.

Brown had a chance. He has blown it. When Blair resigned a year ago, he was a tainted figure. All Brown had to do, to start with, was not be Blair Mark II. Blair was a proven liar, a political trickster with not a single political principle he could call his own. New Labour was already dead in the water. Brown’s aides talked him up as the straight alternative to Blair. His broodiness was presented as deep political thinking. Hints were dropped that he was ‘real Labour’ and had only been held back for ten years by Blair’s premiership.

Then came the election that never was. Brown experienced a bounce in the polls. In true New Labour fashion he maintained his silence, but let his advisers put it about that there would be an election in the autumn. Bad poll figures followed and he had to call the whole thing off. Ludicrously, Brown claimed that cancellation wasn’t because he would have lost the election. Oh, no! Instead he needed more time to set out his vision. The nation continues to wait, but Brown is unable to tell us what his government is for. We advise our readers not to hold their breath for Brown’s vision.

Brown as co-founder of New Labour, continued with the failed Blairite policies. He is now universally considered as bad as Blair was. His government totters from disaster to disaster. Finally the onset of recession has produced meltdown for New Labour.

Brown loyalists say it’s just a mid-term protest. The voters will be back in the fold come next general election. They’re completely wrong. As John McDonnell points out, “If this result does not demonstrate to the Labour Government the need for change, nothing will. It would be a fatal mistake to dismiss this result as a by-election protest vote. . The message is straightforward. Labour must change or we are finished.” That is the pass New Labour has brought us to. They are preparing the way for a Tory victory at the next election. All the polls indicate that Labour could be out of office and in the wilderness for more than a decade.

Early reaction to the result show Labour MPs still paralysed like rabbits caught in the headlights. They can continue on the present disastrous course and lose their seats, or they can break with New Labour and join the fight for the Labour Party to change course.

Labour’s National Policy Forum meets this weekend. The NPF is a typical New Labour body, set up so Labour’s leaders could take policy away from the floor of Party Conference and kick it into the long grass. But the trade unions have a quarter of the votes. In words, at least, they are in a fighting mood. They have tabled 130 policy changes. They want the right to take (quite limited) secondary strike action, free prescriptions, bringing hospital cleaning back in-house, an end to real pay cuts for 6 million public sector pay cuts and a raft of other popular measures

Tony Woodley, joint general secretary of UNITE, writing in the ‘Guardian’ (25.07.08), presumably before the result was announced, declares, “Just three words from Gordon Brown could transform Labour’s prospects even now: ‘Blairism is dead’. Already I can hear the objections from the remaining defenders of the faith – drop the Blairism that won three elections. Alas, each victory at the polls was won with 2m less voters than the one before. We have run out of road there.” Woodley goes on, “People notice what the government seems blind to – that the free market has crashed. Their bills are soaring, their jobs and even their homes don’t feel secure, and they know full well that the pain is not being shared.”

Constituency activists too, are alarmed at the continued drift to the right and the looming electoral catastrophe. The fight needs to be taken into the Labour Party. This is an emergency. It requires emergency action. Either Labour is rearmed with socialist policies, and New Labour policies dumped in the dustbin, or we are in for a long hard period of Tory government.