Anti-war party to target Labour ministers

The votes won by fringe Eurosceptic parties have appeared to deny the Conservative Party a number of MPs at recent elections and a report in this morning's Guardian suggests that an anti-war party hopes to do the same to pro-war Labour MPs.

Reg Keys lost his son in the Iraq war and stood against Tony Blair in last year's General Election.  He aims to launch The Spectre Party at the start of this year's Labour conference.  Top targets will be Foreign Secretary Margaret Beckett (Derby South majority of 5,657), Ruth Kelly (Bolton West majority of just 2,064) and Jack Straw (Blackburn majority of 8,009 including a large Muslim population).

With up to three or four years before the next General Election it is not clear that anti-war feeling will still be the potent factor that helped a number of LibDem MPs defeat Labour at the last election but it is certainly a factor that is being used in current American politics.  The anti-war Ned Lamont is causing huge excitement in Democrat circles as he attempts to unseat Joe Lieberman as Democrat Senate candidate for Connecticut.  Just six years ago Senator Lieberman was Al Gore's running mate but his strong support for George W Bush's war has seen his support collapse in the Democratic Party.  Bloggers are playing a big role in the Lamont campaign - and not an uncontroversial one.

Comments

[Andrew Woodman]

I believe Margaret Beckett's seat gets safer with the boundary changes so I wouldn't get too exited about that, and I think we can remove Ruth Kelly without any help.

What's the finance behind this new party? It will have to be reasonably substantial to have any effect.

[Yet Another Anon]

When Reg Keys stood in Sedgefield in the 2005 General Election, Tony Blair and Labour got 24,421 votes, Reg Keys got 4,252 votes; the Labour vote was 1,679 lower than in 2001, the Conservatives who were only just ahead of the Liberal Democrats (who only saw an increase of 1,311 votes) saw their vote drop by 2,425 and yet UKIP's vote was actually slightly down, so will this Anti-War party actually reduce the majority of Labour ministers, or will it in fact attract the votes of people who haven't been voting and anti-war Conservative voters and some Liberal Democrats and actually end up making it easier for Labour to win, also the war in Iraq is already diminishing as an issue, the Iraqi President Jalal Talabani is already confident that Iraqi Security Forces will be in control throughout Iraq by the end of the year and already there are 2 areas totally under Iraqi control, added to the fact that Respect and the Liberal Democrats had already been standing under an Anti-War banner surely the Labour Party has already faced as much of a challenge on the issue as it is likely to.

[TomTom]

I suppose it is the cheapest publicity you can get.............

[Cllr Iain Lindley]

Alas the new boundaries will probably add another couple of thousand on to Kelly's notional majority, but she is still very vulnerable. I wouldn't say Bolton West was an area I'd consider particularly receptive to an explicit anti-war candidate anyway.

[Andy Peterkin]

Using their childen's coffins as an electoral platform.

Classy.

[Yet Another Anon]

They have picked a very unusual and sinister sounding name, Spectre sounds like one of these groups of bad guys in a James Bond film or the Man from Uncle or something, in fact wasn't that what the bad guys in Battle of the Planets called themselves? A lot of people not knowing much about them might well be put off voting for them by the name I would have thought, Respect after all at least picked quite a positive sounding name.

[Jon Gale]

Isn't Respect already the anti-war party?

[Cllr Iain Lindley]

RESPECT aren't anti-war, they just want the other side to win.

[Richard]

"The Spectre Party"

Led by Blofeld I presume? What a stupid name. How about the "Anti-War Party"? Would make it very clear what they stood for.

[TomTom]

Isn't Respect already the anti-war party?

No it is the Socialist Workers Party aka Anti-Nazi League
aka Stop The War Coalition

[Yet Another Anon]

Apparently there is a Coalition which includes Respect, the Socialist Workers Party and the Scottish Socialist Party - so they don't actually field candidates against each other and all share the same platform despite being seperate parties. These are all linked to the International Socialist Tendency which is an overtly Communist organisation, naturally of course they think that the Ba'athists are all wonderful but in the guise of Respect are of course masquerading as a pro-Islamic Party.

[MM]

What if when Gordon Brown becomes PM he pulls troops out of Iraq and Afganistan to distance himself from Blair, and give his foreign policy a clean start? The whole point of the party would be rather pointless.

Also as a number of people have already said, a number of parties have already been campaigning on an agenda of anti-war.

Not the most sensible thing i've herd, I hate to sound to crude but perhaps Reg Keys should move on, Blair will not be PM at the next election.

[Yet Another Anon]

What if when Gordon Brown becomes PM he pulls troops out of Iraq and Afganistan to distance himself from Blair, and give his foreign policy a clean start? The whole point of the party would be rather pointless.
Judging by what the Iraqi President was saying, there might well not be any British soldiers on active service in Iraq by the turn of next year, as I understand it those founding Spectre were only referring to Iraq and not Afghanistan which after all even the Liberal Democrats supported, Spectre appear to be determined to stand against the ministers regardless of anything else although they don't appear to have any policies other than to attempt to unseat Government ministers who voted for the War in Iraq and curiously they don't mention any other MP's who voted for it including Labour MP's - I'm sure they'll get a sympathy vote and maybe hold on to all their deposit and probably claim responsibility for any ministers losing their seats but I doubt they'll actually contribute to any ministers losing their seats:
Iraq Father Targets Labour Seats

[Richard]

What exactly do they intend to achieve by this? Do they want to help the Tories? If not there's no logic behind it except pure negativity. Don't get me wrong, anything that damages Labour is a good thing but I don't see what single-issue parties MPs hope to achieve. Publicity for the cause perhaps? But does anybody really believe they'll be able to influence British policy over Iraq? At least UKIP had a manifesto that went beyond the EU. This just strikes me as futile gesture politics.

[Richard]

*Sorry, should be single-issue party candidates

[Andy Peterkin]

"Bloggers are playing a big role in the Lamont campaign"

This is true - sadly they are all foaming left-wingers who repulse even liberal Connecticut. Such are the people who have taken over the Democratic Party.

Polls suggest that Lamont would get slammed by the Republican (again, this is ultra-liberal Connecticut). That was even before Lieberman said he'd run as an Independent if he loses to Lamont.

[Yet Another Anon]

What exactly do they intend to achieve by this?
I suppose they hope to have an influence on future policy perhaps to discourage a future government from attempting regime change maybe in Syria or Sudan, mostly they'll get votes of people who wouldn't otherwise vote or off those who otherwise would have voted Conservative or Liberal Democrat which is what appeared to have happened in Sedgefield last time where despite higher a higher turnout and a slightly lower vote for Tony Blair he ended up with a larger majority in his seat.

[Graeme Archer]

I was moved by Reg Keys' witness at the last election and I would hesitate to pass comment on anyone who has gone through what he has. He most certainly didn't strike me as part of the Nazi-Soviet "Stop The War" coalition. He seemed more of the "decent Tory" tradition that didn't support the neocon agenda.

I swing between the two camps. In an ideal world I would back away from the neocon interventionist agenda & would loudly vote for whoever promised to send UK troops into battle as seldom as possible; but recent middle Eastern events make me realise I despise more the sloppy, willfully blind thinking of the "liberal" democrat/ labour pacifist left (just why it's liberal to form an electoral alliance with people who vocally call for the criminalisation of homosexuality is something that escapes me, but I long ago gave up trying to fathom the double-thinking that the Ming Campbell-George Galloway axis practises with ease. Or at least, I can understand it, and it terrifies me.).

Correct Tory response: why don't we do more to expose the real agenda of the "pacifist" left and their fellow-travellers? If this is a cold-war haul then we should get a bit better at vocalising the values and ideals we believe in and we should mount a robust attack on anyone who gives succour to the enemy. Remember the Webbs and the other useful idiots scuttling around Soviet Russia? Jack Straw sucking up to "moderate" Islamic opinion swings ineluctably to mind, as does - to his shame, I hope - does William Hague and his pathetic interventions these last few weeks.

This website likes to slag off Michael Portillo as often as possible; he's actually done a far better job of enunciating a liberal foreign affairs agenda than nearly anyone recently. I'm afraid the only person who has done better still is Tony Blair. Am I the only Conservative who is getting fed up having to rely on a prime minister - whose domestic agenda sickens me - to stand up to the pacifist left and speak out in defence of our way of life? It would be like going back to the 1980s and hearing silence from Michael Heseltine but seeing Kinnock down at Greenham Common speaking out against that generation's incarnation of self-loathing anti-westerners.

[David Belchamber]

"The votes won by fringe Eurosceptic parties have appeared to deny the Conservative Party a number of MPs at recent elections.."

I think it is this comment that should give us pause, rather than worry about the possible impact of an anti-war coalition on Nulab.
At some stage we have to come up with some policies, of which Green issues and Europe will be two vitally important ones at the next GE. If the tories can come up with positive, widely acceptable policies on these two issues, prospective tory voters would have little cause to flirt with fringe or one issue parties.

[MM]

So Mr Archer, I'm sure you were delighted to hear that David Cameron had returned from holiday and his first intervention for 2 and half weeks on the Mid-East crisis was to agree with the Lib-Dem position:

'However Tory Leader David Cameron has said Mr Blair should have described Israel's response as disproportionate.'
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/5250674.stm