WASHINGTON, Oct. 3 (UPI) -- The British political class is in a speculative fever about the prospects of Prime Minister Gordon Brown taking advantage of his current honeymoon in the opinion polls to call a snap election next month that would give him the prospect of five more years in power.
Brown is 11 points ahead of the Conservative opposition in the polls and has just announced the withdrawal of yet another 500 British troops from Iraq by the end of the year. He is firmly expected to deliver two statements to Parliament next week, one pledging even more troop withdrawals and another spelling out his spending plans and priorities for the next five years.
He is also seeking to nail down support in many of the marginal seats in and around the capital with a pledge of some $30 billion of public spending to build a new cross-London rail link. Brown has also brought forward a review of the popular but still creaking National Health Service this week, and all the signals seem to point to the announcement next Tuesday of an election to be held in November.
It is a risky step, despite his opinion-poll lead and the honeymoon he still seems to enjoy after replacing Tony Blair at 10 Downing St. this summer. After 10 years in power the Blair-Brown Labor government is showing some signs of tiredness, with few new policies. While Blair remained in the top job, public grumbling about him (and thus the Labor government) reached serious heights, and that could return fast.
The voters get tired of parties that have been too long in power, and under their youthful new leader David Cameron the Conservatives are showing a new vigor and a striking commitment to the environment that is resonating well, particularly among younger voters.
Still, Brown has shown himself to be firm and competent and more than credible in Britain’s top political job. Almost as soon as he took office he handled a terrorist attack with aplomb and has handled himself well at international events, managing to signal some coolness in his relations with the highly unpopular U.S. President George Bush and the Iraq war while stressing that the United States remains Britain’s key ally.
Despite some serious wobbles in the British financial markets over the rescue of the Northern Rock bank, he seems to have kept his head, and his reputation as a competent finial manager, built up over 10 years as a highly successful chancellor of the exchequer, Britain’s quaint and ancient name for its economics minister.
Indeed, one argument for calling an election soon is that with housing prices stalling and the fallout from the U.S. mortgage crisis still hitting European banks, the news on the economic front might get worse the longer he waits.
And then there is Europe, and the increasingly hot topic of whether Brown should call a referendum before Britain signs up for the new Treaty on the European Union, which critics say will bring about a serious shift of national sovereignty to Europe. The Conservatives are promising to hold a referendum, and opinion polls show massive majorities wanting a referendum. But Brown is refusing one, insisting that he has secured "opt-outs" for Britain in all the contentious issues and a referendum is thus not needed.
The Guardian newspaper reported Wednesday that Conservatives “fear that Gordon Brown will seek to shore up his Euroskeptic credentials by staging a row with his fellow EU leaders in the middle of an election campaign at a summit to discuss the details of the new EU Treaty.”
That summit is scheduled for the next EU summit in Lisbon, Portugal, on Oct. 18, and a well-publicized and carefully concocted row with the rest of the EU in which Brown stood firm on his patriotic British credentials could be a useful way to deflect the voters’ attention away from the referendum, which may well be Brown’s weakest point.
The political parties are readying themselves for an election. Last week Labor Party Treasurer Jack Dromey declared the party was "gearing up" for an election, saying: "I'm confident of our capacity to be ready. We will be."
And William Hague, a former Conservative Party leader who was defeated in the 2001 election and is likely to be foreign minister if his party wins, said this week that Brown will be guilty of "political cowardice" if he ducks the growing expectation that he will call a general election.
"Clearly if he were to step back from having an election now, then dithering would have turned a degree of political cowardice on top because the expectation had been raised so high,” Hague said. "And I think it would be a concession since the Labor Party would have an election now if they thought they could win it, that's pretty clear. It would be a concession that they don't think even they can win an election now with Gordon Brown's remaining honeymoon period."
Having won an election just two years ago and with a comfortable majority in Parliament, there is no need for Brown to call an election until 2010. But under British political rules, a prime minister may hold an election whenever he chooses, and invariably takes care to pick the best possible moment.
It is the trickiest decision in British politics, and only Brown knows which way he will decide this weekend, when he closets himself away with his pollsters and top advisers. The key to his choice is likely to be detailed opinion polls in marginal seats, where there seems to be more support for the Conservatives than in the national polls.
But every Labor prime minister remembers the decision of Prime Minister Jim Callaghan to duck an autumn election in 1978, when he might well have won, and to hold it in the spring of 1979, after a series of dreadful strikes in the winter. The result was the Margaret Thatcher landslide, and the Conservatives stayed in power for 18 years. That memory will be uppermost in Brown’s mind this weekend.
