Labour's botched fight for 'safe' seat

THE campaign for the Dunfermline and West Fife by-election is less than a week old, but already the wheels appear to have fallen off the Labour machine.

Party managers have somehow managed to do what everybody thought was impossible - start to lose the campaign.

This is a seat which should have been won by Labour without breaking sweat. It has a majority of more than 11,000, the well-liked sitting MP, Rachel Squire, died in office and the party's proposed successor is her close and experienced colleague, Catherine Stihler.

The Labour candidate should have been able to say the right things, kiss the right babies and walk off with victory on 9 February, with hardly a ripple on the electoral map of Scotland.

But something has gone very badly wrong and now the opposition parties sniff an upset.

The closure of the Lexmark factory was not something that could have been stopped or avoided, and that will be a problem for Labour. The loss of so many jobs during the campaign will impact on the Labour vote, but it is unlikely to favour any one of the opposition parties to any great extent.

However, of more concern for Labour must be the performance of the Chancellor and neighbouring MP. Gordon Brown has been astonishingly inept and has proved himself to be a liability for his own party.

The Chancellor may be the "King of Fife" and he may like to think of Scotland as his fiefdom, but he has made a tremendous hash of the by-election since he first got involved last week. His first move was to try to bounce the Scottish Executive into coming out against proposals for a £4 toll on the Forth Road Bridge. He issued a statement attacking the proposal and announcing that it had been abandoned, although he was treading all over Jack McConnell's sphere of influence and putting the First Minister in an impossible position.

Mr McConnell reluctantly rode to the Chancellor's rescue by also coming out against the £4 toll, but leaving open the possibility of smaller increases.

Mr Brown's next move was to support proposals for a new bridge over the Forth, once again blundering into devolved policy and intervening in an area where Mr McConnell was assessing information before making an extremely sensitive and hugely expensive decision.

This time, Mr McConnell would not be bounced into a public decision and condemned those who intervened in the way Mr Brown had done as "utterly irresponsible".

In retaliation, Mr Brown authorised sources in London to make it clear that he wanted to "bounce" Mr McConnell into a decision on a new bridge because he had not moved quickly enough to influence the by-election.

The Chancellor did not stop there. He arrived in Dunfermline on Monday to announce his backing for a new £30 million business training college, again stepping across into devolved matters.

On this occasion, he did not even bother to consult Mr McConnell in advance.

It is now clear that Mr Brown knew about the impending job losses at Lexmark, and his outbursts on business colleges and the Forth bridge were designed to deflect attention from Lexmark and on to other, less important topics.

Then, when there was a real, immediate and important constituency issue to discuss yesterday - the Lexmark closure - where was Mr Brown?

He had disappeared back to London.

So where does this leave the voters of Dunfermline and West Fife and the Labour Party message?

Quite simply, they will be completely confused and could be forgiven for being more than a little brassed off.

They have been told by Mr Brown that Labour supports a new Forth bridge and opposes all toll increases, but they have also been told by Mr McConnell that the Labour-led Scottish Executive has not decided on these issues yet and they could end up with the opposite - increasing tolls on the existing bridge and no new crossing.

The only possible reason for Mr Brown's bizarre approach to this by-election is that he is worried that Labour will lose, or at least have its majority slashed, and he is determined to show the Labour Party in the rest of the UK that he can deliver election victories in his back yard.

The danger for Labour, though, is that by firing off in all directions, as he has been doing, the Chancellor has done more harm than good and drawn attention to splits within the Labour camp which were not visible before.

The Scotsman