AS TONY Blair fights tooth and nail to force through the reactionary raft of marketstyle policies and privatisalon inal he sees as nis "legacy" as Prime Minister, all the signs are that New Labour as a party is losing its grip.
It has lost half its members and tour million voters since 1997 - many of them as a result of the war in Iraq and still more reacting angrily to an endless stream of right wing policies.
Opinion polls in mid June revealed that a staggering one in four Labour voters wanted the party to lose the next election, with three quarters of party members feeling completely excluded from the policy-making process.
More and more dispirited back-benchers, encountering local anger and demoralisanon over caucanon relorms, New Labour's abysmal failures on housing and pensions, and the mounting chaos with cuts and job losses in the NHS, are plainly giving up any hope of re-election just one year after Blair proclaimed his "historic third term".
Confirmation of the mood of the electorate came in the two massive by-election setbacks, WiTh New coming fourth to UKIP in Bromley, and failing to win either the Welsh Assembly or Westminster seat at Blaenau Gwent, once the fifth safest Labour seat in the country.
Even in Wales, which has been largely insulated from the worst aspects of New Labour's 'reforms' in education and health, it is clear that Blair's 'modernisation' agenda is a massive turn-off in working class districts.
Both of the independents who gave New Labour the bum's rush made clear that they were positioning themselves to the left of Tony Blair's Party.
Trish Law, widow of the previous MP who snatched the seat as an independent, overturning a 19,000 majority
defeat arch-Blairite UNISON bureaucrat Maggie Jones, said:
"Tony Blair has brought his own demise about, not me. They have said in the ballot box that they do not want Blair, they do not want New Labour."
Of course there are those who see the answer as replacing Blair with Gordon Brown: their problem is that Brown - perhaps hoping to speed Blair's eventual exit by convincing him that Brown is a safe pair of hands - has gone out of his way in the last few months to endorse all of Blair's most hideously reactionary policies.
Signs of a fightback? 16 national unions backed the rally and lobby of parliament
for public services on June
27. On the platform: Michael
Meacher put his hat into ring for leadership contest.
We have seen Brown sign up for both a new nuclear weapons system and for nuclear power - both not only dangerous policies but monumentally expensive at a time when public sector budgets are again facing a squeeze.
Brown has also shafted the pensioners, backed student fees, and endorsed successive waves of market-style education and NHS reform, while the ruinously costly Private Finance Initiative in place of government investment new schools, hospitals, housing, roads, prisons and other projects.
That task falls once again to Labour's beleaguered left wing, including the less than dynamic Campaign Group and the union leaders who sull relain al least a nononal attachment to the left.
It appears that they have summoned up the courage and conviction to mount a challenge to Brown's election as leader when Blair eventually steps down, although this might be derailed by Michael Meacher's premature and