Labour blames humiliating poll defeat on war backlash
http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/politics/story.jsp?story=445182

By Andrew Grice, Political Editor
20 September 2003


Senior Labour figures blamed a backlash against the war in Iraq and
the aftermath of the conflict yesterday for the party's humiliating
defeat in the Brent East by-election.

MPs urged Tony Blair to change his policies and style of government,
with some warning that the party could lose power at the next general
election despite its majority of 163 in the House of Commons.

The Final Chapter
http://www.msnbc.com/news/969723.asp
Seriously weakened by his stance on Iraq, Britain's once globally
popular prime minister may be entering the denouement of his tenure

By Stryker McGuire
NEWSWEEK INTERNATIONAL

Sept. 29 issue ? There's an unsettling symmetry to the political lives
of Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair. Both cast long shadows around the
globe, she as the free-market scourge of communism, he as America's
stalwart ally at war. Both are bound in British history as the most
important (and longest-serving) prime ministers of the last half
century.

http://forums.delphiforums.com/deconland/messages?msg=880

Blow to Blair as majority say war not justified
http://politics.guardian.co.uk/polls/story/0,11030,1047897,00.html
Alan Travis, home affairs editor
Tuesday September 23, 2003
The Guardian

Tony Blair has decisively lost the debate over Iraq with a clear
majority of voters now saying that the war was unjustified, according
to the results of this month's Guardian/ICM poll published today.

The survey shows that British public opinion on Iraq has moved sharply
over the summer in the face of the Hutton inquiry, the failure to find
weapons of mass destruction and the continuing instability in Baghdad.

Brent East was all about the small 13, not the big three
http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1047697,00.html
The major parties can no longer afford to ignore fringe candidates

Martin Kettle
Tuesday September 23, 2003
The Guardian

The high priests of political punditry have ritually examined the
entrails of the Brent East byelection over the past few days and duly
pronounced on what they can see. As acolytes of a pre-existing
political worldview, though, they have naturally tended to describe
the result largely in terms of their own known world.

Trained to look at politics purely in terms of the perpetual circlings
of the three-party battle, they have explained last Thursday's result
in exactly these predetermined categories. The story they have given
us about Brent East is all about disillusion with Labour, about the
Conservatives' failure to capitalise, and the Liberal Democrats'
opportunist dynamism.