Blair Calls For Elections

[Annie]

http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/nm/20050405/wl_nm/britain_election_dc

Blair Calls May 5 UK Election as Lead Shrinks

1 hour, 59 minutes ago


LONDON (Reuters) - Prime Minister Tony Blair confirmed on Tuesday the worst-kept secret in British politics -- that an election will be held on May 5 -- as polls suggested a real contest for the first time since 1992.

With Iraq weighing heavily on his ratings, Blair put his government's economic credentials at the heart of the campaign...

If those figures were replicated on polling day, analysts say, Blair would still win a third term but with a much looser grip on parliament. At the previous two elections in 1997 and 2001, Blair easily won triple-digit majorities.

 

[NATO AIR]

let us hope he wins

 

[onedomino]

I wish Blair could win, but that his party would lose. I realize that such is impossible. Even if it could happen, Blair would then be ineffective. I think the Blair government has made very serious mistakes regarding its virtually unqualified support of UK ratification of the EU Constitutional Treaty, and its startling support for EU weapons sales to China. Blair made the right choice on Iraq, and in comparison to France and Germany, his economic policies have been more reasonable.

 

[manu1959]

if not blair then who?

 

[Said1]

if not blair then who?

Oooh crap! What's his name?

 

[Annie]

if not blair then who?

There's some differences predicted on how Labour will do, but all seem to think Blair will be re-elected:

http://www.samizdata.net/blog/archives/007420.html

...Just how bad this will be for the government, I do not know. Maybe in a couple of days it will all be forgotten by almost everybody. But however this particular story plays out in the next few days, I get the feeling that, in Britain now, a political corner has been turned, some time during the last few months.

Whether the electorate as a whole has any plans to vote differently remains to be seen. Many of my friends, such as regular Samizdata commenter Paul Coulam to name but one, have said to me that Blair is about to be re-re-elected with a similar majority to last time around, just as Thatcher was. Coulam certainly said this to me a few weeks back. But governments take a long time to unravel, and what does seem to have happened is that the metropolitan media of Britain have got bored with Labour. They are now more bored with Labour than they are disgusted and embarrassed by the Conservatives, which was not true a year ago. Michael Howard may disgust many Samizdata readers by being just another opportunist political hack, but he is nevertheless, I would say, a much more impressive and consequential figure than his two predecessors at the head of the Conservative Party...

http://www.iainmurray.org/MT/archives/000998.html

The election campaign begins officially tomorrow, barring some catastrophe overnight. So here's my prediction.

The Tories will perform much better than expected or than they deserve, with people turning to them as their distaste for Blair and Labour finally outweighs their revulsion at the thought of voting Conservative. In many ways, it will be a complete reversal of the 1992 election, where people went into the booth intedning to vote Major out but couldn't face a Kinnock government. Instead, people will go into the booth intending to hold their nose and vote for Blair again, but find they just can't.

Labour will run an outwardly slick, inwardly fractious campaign and the cracks will begin to show through the wallpaper. The Brown question will start to dominate over the issues - is he Blair's annointed or does Blair stand with a dagger aimed at his back? Blair will age visibly over the course of the campaign. Finally, the famous opinion on the legality of the war will be leaked towards the end of the campaign (this is a hunch - I have no inside information, so don't come looking for me, Mr MI5 man). This will all lead to Labour gaining no ground on its current position.

The Lib Dems will take votes hand-over-fist from Labour, but they will mostly be in rock-solid safe Labour seats. At the same time, they will lose a lot of ground to the Tories where they gained ground in the last two elections. The result will be no overall change in the Liberals' support levels but a significant change in personnel.

In percentage terms, I'm going for:

Conservatives 37%
Labour 36% (with a 2% tactical vote to the Liberals*)
Liberal Democrats 20% (with a 1% tactical vote to Labour*)
*reflecting residual anti-Tory hatred

Which translates into seat terms, using Martin Baxter's calculator:

Conservatives 218
Labour 342
Liberal Democrats 56
Overall Labour Majority 38

... and one heck of a legitimacy problem for the new Labour government. The last time anything like this happened was in 1974, when Labour formed a government despite having received fewer votes than the Conservatives. Yet it was a minority government, unable to survive more than a few months. that will not be the case this time, barring major defections from Labour post-election (which will be unlikely). Blair will almost certainly fall as a result, Brown will replace him and politics will return to normal following the Blairite interregnum. The Tories will smell blood and be an effective opposition again at last.

Well, that's a fairly bold set of predictions. I wouldn't believe a word of it if I were you.

 

[Annie]

I hope this is wrong:

http://newsisyphus.blogspot.com/2005/04/that-special-relationship.html

That Special Relationship
At the request of the Rt. Hon. Anthony Blair, Her Majesty the Queen has dissolved Parliament. A General Election is upon us, to be held May 5th, and the stakes could not be higher. For the British, a crucial choice between ever-deeper European integration or a more Euro-skeptic stance is looming. For we Americans, and especially for American conservatives, the maddening choice is between our principles and ideals or the best ally we’ve had to date in the critical test of our times: the War on Terror.

First, the players and the latest polls:

SkyNews:
Labour 36
Conservative 36
Lib-Dems 21

The Times:
Labour 37
Conservative 35
Lib-Dems 19

The Independent:
Labour 36
Conservative 33
Lib-Dems 21

The Guardian:
Labour: 37
Conservative: 34
Lib-Dems: 21

Financial Times:
Labour: 34
Conservative: 39
Lib-Dems 21

Daily Telegraph:
Labour: 36
Conservative 33
Lib-Dems 22

And now, just a few hours ago, the latest YouGov figures in today’s Telegraph show that the Tories have closed the gap to an even 36-36 tie.

There are a couple of things one can say about this. First, the fact that the Tories are competitive is coming as a bit of a shock in Britain. The consensus view of the moment seems to hold that the Conservative rise is due more to Labour unattractiveness than Tory strategy. We see no reason to disagree.

From our standpoint as Americans in the Near Abroad it’s almost impossible to grasp the almost unanimous hatred of the Iraq War amongst the British people. Almost to a man, the British think that the War was based on a lie and is, at best, wrongheaded, at worst, criminal.

Thus, despite the ever-more government addicted British people’s natural attachment to Labour, the sheen has begun to come off Tony Blair. The time has long since passed that Labour and its supporters have thanked his electibility for their positions; the party has begun to think of itself as rightfully in power and set to shed its “New Labour” guise in favor of old-fashioned socialism. It has begun to think it can do without “Bush’s Poodle.”

The real astonishing news is the continued rise of the fanatically pro-European Union Liberal Democrats, a party which, in our estimation, is absolutely astonishing in its ability to be wrong on just about every important issue of the day, foreign or domestic. The depressing reality is that more than 1 in 5 Britons now fervently agree that they should be ruled by Belgians and Italians rather than Parliament and that somehow a vague concept of “human rights” which is nothing more than the established prejudices of a left-wing social order, has the force of “law.”

The good guys at Powerline call the British election a “win-win” situation in that, whatever may pass, the British will either elect a known friend of the United States or the Conservative Party, long a stalwart of the old Atlantic alliance.

We wish we could agree.

The fact is that the Tories have always had more than a strong element of anti-Americanism in its ranks. This fact, along with the natural opportunism of an opposition poised to take advantage of the governing party’s support for a deeply unpopular war, has bred a new sort of Conservatism. The kind that can rise in Parliament and ask the Prime Minister “how many Iraqi women and children must die before the Americans have their vengeance in Falluja.”

There is a reason Michael Howard, the Conservative leader, has not been invited to the White House, as have virtually all of his predecessors. Nor was the Conservative Party delegation given a very warm welcome back at the RNC in 2004. Riven by incompatible positions on the only question that matters—that of Europe—the Conservatives have become a party of mush that offers nothing except platitudes and snarky comments.

We never thought we would say this, but……

British friends: please vote for the socialist.

# posted by NewSisyphus

 

[padisha emperor]

Blair will win.
The Labour party can't lose, or it would be really surprising, and then, if the Labour win, Blair is automatically Prime Minister, as chief of the Labour.