Brown aide: we will lose next election

At last someone in the Labour party has had the courage to say it. We, ordinary traditional Labour voters are deserting the party in droves as it turns, under Tony Blair, into a Tory-light party.

Michael Wills, a former Home Office minister and the Labour MP for Swindon North, has warned that if the party maintains it's present course then it will lose the next election and be out of power for the next 15 years. He says voters have become so disillusioned under Blair's governance that they have simply stopped listening to what the party has to say.

At a fringe meeting during a weekend conference organised by Compass, a leftwing pressure group, Mr Wills claimed that at the last election "every single Labour MP on the doorstep reported profound disillusionment and disengagement. We scraped through. If 14,000 Labour voters had voted Tory in May 2005, we would have been in a hung parliament. That is all it took - that is how narrow it was".

He continued: " We have got good messages and we are delivering on public services so why is it they don't listen any more? It is because they don't trust us. Iraq is an important part of that. The presidential style of the prime minister - which brought us great dividends in the early years and now we are seeing the mirror image of that - is also part of it."

He added: "Unless we can get people to start listening to us, unless they are prepared to hear the messages we are putting across, we are going to lose next time. There is no question about it."

He has got a point. At the last local elections I did not vote Labour for the first time in my life, simply because I am sick of the right wing tendencies of this party when it comes to law and order. Even this week John Reid weighed in once again by attacking the judiciary over the sentencing of a paedophile. And once again Blair responded by promising an overhaul of the Criminal Justice Act.

If I wanted to be governed by Tories I'd have voted for the Tories.

Blair has always operated on the assumption that "Guardian readers" like myself would have nowhere else to go come election day. And for the first three elections under which New Labour won he was broadly correct in that assumption.

However, the benefit of the doubt vanished after the invasion of Iraq and many of us, myself included, simply felt soiled after voting for Blair a third time.

We want our party back please. However, Brown will lose respect if he doesn't move against Blair soon.

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