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Why Gordon Brown will lose Glasgow East

In the fag-end days of the Blair premiership, the most enthusiastic cheerleader for his deadly and insidious usurper, Gordon Brown, was the media commentariat in Scotland, writes James MacMillan. They sensed their time was coming. Gordon was one of them.

There was much self-congratulatory copy about "cultural Presbyterianism", and how the son of the Manse would usher the nation into a new, virtuous and much-delayed egalitarian future. Their emphasis was always on the husk of Calvinism, with all the messy and embarrassing moral and religious stuff taken out, obviously.

At one point, this might have appealed to me. I used to be on the Left. Indeed, in the mid-1980s I was a Labour Party branch chairman. I had a "coal-face" perspective on how the party was being pulled about by conflicting cultural values.

The new metropolitan elites, in London and in Glasgow, would fiercely contest any connection between social breakdown and their highly valued liberal progressivism in matters of personal morality.

As the philosopher John Haldane observes: "Many of the urban middle class who support New Labour … are detached from traditional communities, and celebrate their rejection of conformity to older social norms."

This fault-line may be about to separate the party leadership from its grassroots support in Scotland. To those of us who live there, the fact that Brown's demise will begin in his political heartland is not surprising.

Full article at the Daily Telegraph.