Blair has ignored Labour's natural voters, says Hain

With a gift for stating the bloody obvious, Peter Hain, the Northern Ireland Secretary, has launched an attack on Blair's legacy by stating that Blair has been ignoring traditional Labour voters.

"The relationship between Labour and millions of progressive voters has become sour and distrustful," he said. Writing in the New Statesman, he said: "We have been careless, indifferent and, at times, needlessly offensive to the concerns and values of too many of our natural supporters."

I find it impossible to believe that this is something that has only recently come to Hain's attention. After all we now have a Labour Prime Minister who uses the term "Guardian reader" as an insult. Indeed, this has been the defining characteristic of New Labour, their belief that come election day the more traditional Labour supporters will have nowhere else to go. It is to that end that Blair played so relentlessly to Daily Mail readers.

Nor is this a phenomenon that is exclusive to New Labour, it is now becoming the aim of David Cameron as he fights to pull his party towards the centre ground by adopting policies that his party simply don't support at grass roots level. He's working on Blair's assumption towards traditional Labour supporters that come election day Tories like Norman Tebbit will vote for him even if they loathe what he stands for because they simply will have no other choice.

This cynical approach to politics started with Clinton's Third Way in the United States and, like all things American, eventually made it's way over here. But as this has been New Labour's approach for the past ten years it's startling to think that Hain has only just realised that this is what is going on.

Nor do I suspect that Hain has any intention of reversing this process or that Gordon Brown would let him if he actually seriously proposed that New Labour should.

So what Hain is doing is telling us what we all already know in the hope of improving his chances of getting second-preference votes in the battle for the Deputy leadership of the party. He certainly isn't bringing this up to highlight a problem that he feels should be corrected.

This, indeed, is the reason why I feel the number of the electorate who take to the polls is going down with each election since New Labour has come to power. Indeed, it is the polar opposite to what Bush has been doing in the states where he has played relentlessly to his "base".

Here in the UK, politicians have recently won elections by ignoring their base on most issues and playing for the mythical centre ground. As a result passion has gone from politics and a general feeling that "they are all the same" has taken it's place.

Nor, after two million people took to the streets to protest against the Iraq war, can politicians claim that people no longer care about politics. The Iraq war has proven that they care passionately, but that come election time they simply find it impossible to get excited about the choices before them.

Indeed, at the last election it was almost impossible in this country for a traditional Labour supporter to register a protest vote as the only party that opposed the war - the Lib Dems - had so little chance of winning most seats that to attempt to vote for them would have opened up the possibility of allowing the Tories victory, a Tory party that had also supported the Iraq war. Indeed, were it not for Tory votes in the House of Commons then Blair would have been defeated, the country would not have gone to war, and Blair would have had to stand down.

So it's nice that Hain has taken the time to tell us what the problem is. Unfortunately for Mr Hain this is a problem that anyone with even a passing interest in politics is already acutely aware of.

The larger question is what New Labour under Gordon Brown intends to do about it. And, from his initial noises about increasing the number of days suspects can be held in detention without trial, I suspect the answer is not a great deal.

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