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The Prosser Perspective.... a weekly column from Dover and Deal MP Gwyn Prosser.

11 June 2009

The results of the County Council and Euro elections were pretty grim for the Labour Party and there’s no point in denying it. Some analysts have said that they were the worst the Party has experienced since 1918 – I can’t go back that far but they’re certainly the most dismal I can remember in the 30 years I’ve lived in Dover.

In my patch we lost five hardworking councillors at a stroke and they’ll be sorely missed by their constituents. In the South East as a whole Labour held on to its member of the European Parliament, Peter Skinner, but our vote was 9% down on our performance in the Euro elections of 2004.

That’s pretty hard to swallow for my members but it’s not hard to analyse the reason for the reduction in vote because no governing party has ever entered any election that I remember, in the teeth of such a ‘perfect storm’ and so many layers of discontent.

Firstly, our economy is in recession and although that’s the direct result of the global credit crunch it’s the Government that carries the can. Secondly, people are rightly angry about the expenses scandal and whilst this should affect MP’s on all sides of the House it’s the incumbent party that people protest the most about and thirdly, the behaviour of some cabinet members and others have given people the view that Labour is not united.

This perfect storm has battered us about and blown us off course a bit but our ship is still seaworthy and more than capable of continuing its voyage. I would be far more worried if our loss of votes in the Euro elections had transferred to the Conservatives but that was not the case. In our patch the Conservative vote fell by 3% compared with their performance in 2004 and they failed to achieve the breakthrough they expected. The fact is that all of Labour’s vote loss went to the small fringe parties and with a total of 26 voting options on the ballot paper it was easy for people to find a non-mainstream party to vote for in protest.

It’s well known that people use local and European elections to register their unhappiness with the government – in the safe knowledge that their votes won’t land them with a Conservative Government and the fact that we are now in the fifth year of our third term of office makes this phenomena even more likely.

So what’s to be done? We need to see out the storm, clean up politics, push forward with economic recovery and continue our program of reform tailored to people’s needs.

Some of my colleagues have taken fright at the rough political waters we are steaming through, panicked at the prospect of floundering and blamed all our misfortunes on the Captain. I’ve spent 25 years in politics and more than that time at sea and – believe me – the last thing any crew should contemplate in stormy weather is to ditch the Skipper.