It is really not necessary to come up with elaborate explanations for why Gordon Brown’s Labour Party did so badly in the local and European elections in Britain last week. In a democracy, sooner or later every government loses. The scale of the loss is usually proportionate to the amount of time the government have been in office, and the scale of the grievances that have built up during their tenure.
Labour has been in power since 1997, and they have made a lot of people very unhappy. Their leader was Chancellor of the Exchequer for ten years. If any single man was centrally responsible for the British economy, it was Gordon Brown. It is hardly fair to blame the global financial crisis on Brown, but it is not at all unfair for voters to notice that Britain has been particularly hard hit by the crisis and to blame Brown for the resulting collapse. Nor is it unfair for voters to believe that, if Brown was so exercised about the parliamentary expenses scandal, he should at some point in the past twelve years have noticed it and done something about it.
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