HAHAHAHAHAHAHA!

That's the sound of me laughing in the face of Gordon Brown. Yes, Labour have LOST the Glasgow East by-election, the SNP turning in a 22% swing to obliterate Labour's majority of over 13,000.

I'm looking forward to Labour ministers being wheeled out to recite the usual pisspoor mantra about "reflecting on what the voters have told us in the weeks and months ahead". In fact, Douglas Alexander has already done just that. But as I've said before, until they realise that the voters are actually telling them to "fuck off", nothing will change.

So what do Labour do now? In truth, the odds are that they won't do anything. Labour MPs seem to lack the balls to make a move against Brown, which indicates that they're perhaps now resigned to defeat at the next election. After all, if a Scottish Prime Minister can't hang on to one of the safest Scottish Labour seats, what hope is there for any Labour MP in England without a radical change of direction?

Make no mistake, this by-election result shows us that Labour are staring in the face of general election annihilation. We're not talking of something on the same scale as Labour's routing of the Conservatives in 1997, we're talking something far greater, a defeat that could leave Labour as the third biggest party in Westminster and make Nick Clegg leader of the opposition.

I don't think there's anything Labour can now do to save themselves, so really they need to be looking at damage limitation. The danger is that if they stay on until April 2010, the latest possible date for the election, they risk leaving just as the economy starts to improve and just in time for the Conservatives to capitalize on it, just as Labour themselves did in 1997. Labour's best hope to avoid multiple parliaments in opposition is to go now, take the kicking and hope that the Conservatives fuck it up. That's the truly parlous state they're in.