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Labour headed for a ‘bloodbath’

LONDON: Pressure on Prime Minister Gordon Brown to shape up or quit intensified on Sunday — the second day of Labour Party’s annual conference in Manchester — as rebel MPs seized on a survey predicting a Labour “bloodbath” at the next election in 2010 with half of Mr. Brown’s Cabinet likely to be “swept away,” giving Tories an unprecedented landslide victory. The survey in the pro-Labour The Observer newspaper was likely to undermine Mr. Brown’s attempt to re-launch his leadership on the back of his government’s firm handling of the financial turmoil.

Mr. Brown’s claim in interviews over the weekend that he was the “right” man to lead the party into the next election was contradicted by the poll, which showed Labour was headed for a “wipe-out” under his leadership, confirming findings of a string of other independent polls published on the eve of the conference.

“The sheer scale of the humiliation is almost as bad as that endured by the Tories in 1997, suggesting it could take Labour a similar time [more than a decade] to claw its way back to power,” said the newspaper in a front-page report. Meanwhile, a YouGov survey of Labour members for the Sunday Times indicated that 53 per cent thought Mr. Brown was “indecisive and dithering” with only 34 per cent saying he had a “vision.”

A defiant Mr. Brown tried to shrug off opinion polls, saying he would not be distracted by them. He also sought to play down the scale of the “revolt” .

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