The European Elections: Labour celebrates return to South
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Your support makes all the difference.A JUBILANT Labour Party yesterday highlighted its long- awaited resurgence in the South to claim it was on course to win the next general election without the help of the Liberal Democrats.
The gains in Essex, Suffolk, Norfolk, Hertfordshire and Kent showed Labour had crossed a watershed, Jack Cunningham, shadow Foreign Secretary, said. 'Labour has won in areas where we haven't been successful since the 1960s, and in some cases even further back than that.'
Margaret Beckett, the party's acting leader, added: 'No longer can the Liberals claim to be the party of opposition in the South.
'Labour is the main challenger here as elsewhere, and the Liberals can no longer sustain any claim that a Labour vote in the south of England is a wasted vote. Where we need the votes to win a general election, we are getting them.'
Party analysts, ignoring the low turnout, translated the European results into a general election majority of more than 150 seats, producing an impressive list of nearly 60 parliamentary seats which Labour would gain south of the Midlands and the Wash, running from Lincoln and Peterborough to Southampton, and from Stroud to Basildon and Waveney, via London, where Labour markedly improved on past performances.
Labour took particular delight in the Herefordshire and Shropshire result, which took it from third place to a win in a seat that had been an outside target for the Liberal Democrats who had been second in five of its six Commons constituencies. That result and others showed that a significant number of previously Conservative voters had 'come straight across to Labour', Jack Straw, its campaign manager, said.
Equally, in the massive Euro- constituencies with their 500,000 or so voters, Labour failed to take Thames Valley from the Conservatives by a mere 758 votes, was less than 2,000 votes short of taking Sussex South and Crawley, and was less than 4,000 short in true- blue Cambridgeshire, the seat which includes John Major's Huntingdon constituency.
As the Liberal Democrats complained that Labour votes had prevented them from taking Conservative seats, closer analysis showed that both the opposition parties had cost the other gains.
Mrs Beckett said Labour's performance was due to 'deep anger at the Tory government's incompetence and its broken promises on tax'. It had, she said, been given 'notice to quit'.
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