FOUR DAYS FROM BY-ELECTION DISASTER?

On Thursday night I expect I will stay up to wait for the result from Crewe and Nantwich. And something tells me that Labour will lose. Maybe it's the fact that their exceptionally stupid "toff" campaign has backfired. Indeed one of the Labour Party lads dressed up in top hat and tails is apparently a former pupil of MGS - Manchester Grammar School - one of the top independent schools in the country. What a crass message to the electorate.
Frank Dobson, not the most subtle of campaigners, was apparently on Newsnight the other night slamming the Tory candidate for being an Etonian (actually he isn't) . How pathrtic is this line of attack ?
As Dobbo well knows ( or maybe he doesn't) even left icons like Tony Benn went to public school (Westminster). So did, for God's sake, the late Paul Foot of the SWP (Shrewsbury). Frankly, I couldn't care less where someone went to school , because in the end it is their values and the way they live their lives which matter.
I'm a council house kid who went to Cambridge. I mixed with plenty of "toffs" And many of them were socialists. Many, yes, were Tories. But a working-class background is not necessarily an indicator of great socialist credentials.
What's left over at the Crewe campaign? Oh, yes, Xenophobic leaflets criticising Edward Timpson for being against ID cards. Well, that's really clever - and very likely to annoy the core Labour voters who also oppose them. So.
Yet again, New Labour has gone for cheap stunts, right-wing rhetoric and what amounts to a complete failure to understand the gravity of the situation we face. Tamsin Dunwoody deserved better than this farrago.As Dick Gaughan famously sang, "It isn't what you're born with, it's what you do with what you've got."