BRITISH Labour Prime Minister Tony Blair has surprised nobody by calling an early election on May 5. The date has been touted for weeks. Though not obliged to go to the polls next year, Blair has clearly chosen now as the best moment to win a historic third term in office — no British Labour government has ever lasted more than two terms.
On the face of it, in a month’s time, Blair should be back in Downing Street. Most opinion polls give Labour a narrow edge over the main opposition Conservative party whose third leader since 2001 is the veteran — but not particularly admired — politician Michael Howard, the home secretary in Mrs. Thatcher’s last government.
What is expected to be a bitterly fought election will surely produce some surprises as the two main parties try to dish the dirt on each other. It is not yet clear the degree to which the widely unpopular British involvement in George Bush’s Iraq invasion will tell against Tony Blair. The Conservative party supported the invasion at the time but have since scavenged for details on which it can condemn the government’s Iraq policy, perhaps the most significant of which may turn out to be the legal basis, or lack of it, on which Blair took the country to war without a second UN resolution specifically authorizing such action.
The Liberal Democrats, the third main party, were opposed to intervention in Iraq from the start and, at one point, had to endure taunts of faintheartedness and lack of patriotism. They might expect to reap the benefit of their consistency and are focusing on the untrustworthiness of the Blair government. Yet the British prime minister appears to have done a good job of disassociating Downing Street from massaging the intelligence reports on WMD and manipulating the evidence to suit its intentions. Largely exonerated by the Butler report, the government has been able to blame the failures on poor intelligence rather than the way in which its key Joint Intelligence Committee handled the information. The former chairman of the JIC, Sir John Scarlett, has even been appointed to run MI6 and as a classic British sop to critics, the way in which intelligence is evaluated is being reviewed.
It may therefore be too late for the Liberal Democrats to challenge Blair’s honesty over Iraq. The Conservatives are mounting a broader attack on Blair’s trustworthiness, citing his failure after seven years in office to deliver on many campaign promises. Unfortunately for them, all British politicians appear to suffer from a low level of trust and esteem among voters which explains why, at the last election, turnout dropped below 60 percent for the first time since 1918. There are predictions the figure could be much lower next month. If so, it might be bad news for Blair who needs traditional Labour voters to turn out, despite their disappointment at the party’s abandonment of core socialist principles in favor of right-of-center policies. The government’s tactic looks to be to scare these people to the polls by warning that their abstention could bring back a Conservative government.
