We have lost 5 million voters since 1997.

Michael Meacher MP has written an extremely informative post on it here. An except of it is:

Labour won in 1997, not because of Blair or New Labour mantra, but because the electorate was heartily sick of the Tories and wanted them out at any price.   John Smith would have won by a huge margin too.   But having won in 1997 on the back of virulent hostility to the Tories, Blair in two further elections then achieved the biggest loss of voters of any party in modern times.  The Labour vote collapsed by almost 4 million from 13.5 million in 1997 to just 9.6 million in 2005.   For someone who was such a monumental failure to claim any credibility in predicting political success takes one’s breath away – like someone who’s engineered a train crash telling people how to cut the accident rate.

So, it turns out that we lost 4 milion of them between 1997-2004, despite massive achievements of Labour. Frank Dobson urges the party faithful to identify the policies which were popular, but not to ‘defend the indefensible’.

Nonetheless, Frank feels that Ed Miliband “.. is the best fitted to take on the task to lead our Party to success.”

Sorry this video is cut short. I ran out of tape.

That’s why it may be necessary to move ‘more than a millimetre’ away from Tony Blair’s “New Labour”, which a man that Blair admires immensely, Tony Benn, has called a different party.

Happy memories indeed for supporters of one of more of the Tonies.