LONDON, July 28 (UPI) -- London bookmaker William Hill is now offering short odds that Prime Minister Gordon Brown will not be leading the Labor Party into the next British election, which must be held within the next 22 months.
Last week's by-election in the traditional Labor stronghold of Glasgow saw a humiliating defeat for Labor and a stunning success for the Scottish Nationalist Party. It follows a similar earlier humiliation last month in another by-election in which Labor was knocked down into fourth place, behind even the far-right and anti-immigrant British National Party.
These heavy defeats have destroyed what was left of the morale of the Labor Party in Parliament, and plots and rumors of anti-Brown coups are rife in an atmosphere of financial crisis and a looming economic recession.
This is no surprise. Labor members of Parliament fear mass unemployment after being voted out next time. If the Glasgow East voting results are matched in the general election, Labor's current 350 seats (out of a total of 646) would drop to a rump of 20 seats.
So it is probably safe to make three predictions on British politics. First, the era of New Labor that Tony Blair and Brown launched with their landslide victory of 1997 is now over. Labor is almost certain to lose the next election, and Brown may well lose his job before the end of this year.
The second prediction relates to the prospective next Conservative government led by the youthful and engaging David Cameron, a privately wealthy upper-class figure who has managed to make the Tories look electable again. Currently, Cameron and his team reckon they should be safe for two terms. They expect to inherit the tail end of the recession when they win power in 2010 and then to take advantage of a cyclical recovery to coast to re-election four years later.
But the second and third predictions could put a nasty spoke into their wheel. First, the implication of the Glasgow East result is that the United Kingdom is heading for a constitutional crisis over Scottish independence.
Alex Salmond, the SNP leader who is also chief minister of the devolved Scottish Parliament, said ahead of the vote that Glasgow East would produce "a political earthquake." He was right. The polls now suggest he could win a referendum on full independence for Scotland.
Many of the largely England-based Conservatives would relish the prospect of an almost-permanent majority for them if the Scots are no longer voting Labor (and Labor relies heavily on the Celtic vote in Wales and Scotland).
Some Conservatives also like the prospect of the financial savings that could come from Scottish independence. The Institute for Public Policy Research, a respected think tank, issued a report this month that found Scotland received more than $11,000 per head of public spending in 2007/08, or 21 percent more than the U.K. average, and $2,200 more per head than England.
The public spending system, in which Scotland receives some $15 billion a year more than it puts into the national economy, has become "a source of increasing tension and resentment between England and Scotland," the Institute noted.
But there is a problem. The SNP is an anti-nuclear party, which campaigns already against the nuclear bases for Britain's ballistic submarine fleet at Gareloch and Faslane. An independent Scotland would expel them, while also taking over the still-important revenues from most of North Sea oil. As the SNP slogan says, "It's Scotland's oil."
The third prediction is that a new Conservative government would face yet again a new crisis over Europe.
The party is committed to holding the referendum that Gordon Brown ducked on the new Lisbon treaty of the European Union, which would give the EU a permanent president and its own foreign ministers and many fewer national vetoes on issues like harmonization of laws and some critical economic and social policies.
Britain is almost certain to vote "No" in such a referendum, which would require it either to leave the EU or to seek a very different status within it, signing up only for the single market and free trade rather than allow any more drift toward a federal European super-state.
Europe was the issue that ended Margaret Thatcher's career as prime minister. It broke the government of her successor, John Major, and the European question lies in wait to ambush David Cameron and divide his party all over again.
More than 60 percent of Britain's trade is with its EU partners, which makes it unlikely that Britain would leave the EU altogether. But any renegotiation of the terms of British membership would be long, difficult and bitter, and attended by a strong chorus of Conservatives in Parliament demanding that Britain leave altogether and perhaps join the North American Free Trade Agreement instead. (This would not go down well in Washington, where Britain's place in the EU is seen as crucial to the defense of U.S. interests in Europe, strategic as well as economic.)
So the passing of the New Labor era and the Conservative return to power will be a difficult and probably stormy business. Ironically, it need not have happened, had Tony Blair not joined the Iraq War so enthusiastically, or if Labor had not lost its political nerve.
It could have campaigned in Glasgow East on some real achievements in the traditionally depressed district. The number of unemployed claimants has fallen by half since the Labor government came to power; 11 new schools have been built, of which five have won an "excellent" rating in the national league tables.
But the Labor government has lost its sense of pride and purpose, sunk by a mood of end-of-regime. The sadness for its successors is that Britain is heading into a series of further distracting crises that will make it introspective and probably a less useful and reliable ally of the United States for some years to come.
