THE working class electors in the safe Labour seat of Dunfermline and Fyfe ignored the crisis at the top of the Liberal Democrats, so determined were they to strike a heavy blow at the Blair-Brown leadership of the Labour Party and Labour Government.
Their victory took the Liberal Democrats by surprise, while the Labour leadership has been shaken to its foundations.
Significantly, the electors by-passed the Scottish Nationalists completely and treated the ultra opportunist Tory leader Cameron with the contempt that he deserves.
The hammer blow to Gordon Brown is that, the man who would be king, has been personally rejected in the constituency where he lives, next door to the constituency that he represents, in his alleged stronghold, because he is now seen by millions of workers as being exactly the same as Blair.
He must have thought that the electorate was not listening to him when he has been stressing that if he becomes Prime Minister he will continue with Blair’s privatising policies, and when he has been assuring the CBI bosses that anything that they want he will deliver, from low wages to the lightest of health and safety inspection regimes.
He was wrong. Not only has the working class been listening, it has now shown that it does not want Blair and it does not want him.
Meanwhile yesterday afternoon, Blair was pledging that he will continue with all of the privatisation policies that have turned the Labour government into a modern version of the Titanic.
Not only will he need the votes of all of the Tory MPs to have any chance of carrying these policies in the Houses of Parliament, the only way that he will be able to continue in government in the period ahead will be in alliance with the Tories, after splitting the Labour Party.
The trade unions now have a duty to perform to make sure that they do not end up like the below decks, third class passengers on the Titanic.
They must use all their power to carry out a massive purge of the Labour Party, and to oppose and defeat the policies of the Blair-Brown government, from pensions to privatisation, so as to defend the basic gains and the basic rights of the working class.
In the course of this struggle they must not allow themselves to be weakened by arguments that if they struggle seriously they will bring the government down and see a return of the Tories, meaning that they must grit their teeth and put up with what is termed as the lesser evil.
Following this course is certain to result in a return of the Tories, either in the form of a national government, with Blair and Cameron as partners, or a Tory government in its own right.
The only way that the Tories can be kept out is for the trade unions to set out to defeat the government, meaning that they must not hesitate to bring the Blair-Brown government down.
Having demonstrated their power, they must lead the working class and the majority of the middle class forward to replace the Blair and Brown Labour government with a workers government that will carry out socialist policies.
It will immediately withdraw all British troops from Iraq and Afghanistan, end the privatisation programme, reinstate all final salary pension schemes and restore the link between increases in the state pension and increases in average earnings.
This is the struggle that is heralded by the major defeat for Labour at the hands of its own supporters in Dunfermline and Fyfe.
Central to its success is the rapid building up of the revolutionary leadership of the Workers Revolutionary Party.
