Labour’s heartland is now being lost

Jun 6 2009 by Adrian Pearson, The Journal

GORDON Brown has been told he is losing his party’s heartland as the Conservatives take full control of North Tyneside.

Linda Arkley beat Labour’s John Harrison by more than 4,000 votes to become the next mayor.

Last month, her campaign had been launched by David Cameron who said voters must use the ballot box to pas their judgement on the Prime Minister.

Immediately after the results were revealed yesterday after a five-hour count, Mr Harrison announced he would not be standing for election again, and later refused to say if a visit by Gordon Brown last week was beneficial to his campaign.

Outgoing mayor Mr Harrison, who beat Ms Arkley in the 2005 poll, blamed national politics for his loss, saying voters had shown they were fed up with the situation at Westminster.

But the new Tory mayor said the expenses scandal had damaged all sides and insisted Mr Harrison had simply not done enough to convince voters he deserved the top job. Ms Arkley, whose campaign focused on Mr Harrison’s “wild spending”, said one of her first acts on Monday will be to “get the books out”.

She said: “I think this fantastic news for the Conservatives, this is us moving forward in the North East.

“I really feel that all parties have suffered as a result of the expenses issues, it is not just the Labour party.

“Now we have to take the chance to reconnect and the best way to do that is to have a General Election.”

Ms Arkley added: “When I was elected last time we had a huge deficit and big financial problems. I had to put a recovery plan in place which took nearly 21 months to get through. I left very healthy balances and we did that alongside regeneration efforts.

“Now I’ll be wanting to look again at what we do to get us back on track.”