As Britain’s Liberal Democratic Party held its annual conference last weekend, it was clear as the Party’s leader Nick Clegg spoke, that he was summoning his troops to be ready for another round of General Elections in Britain. Political opinion in the country suggests that Prime Minister Gordon Brown will announce a May date, having decided that he must deliver one more Budget to the British people before he calls it.
It is obvious to most people that the Labour party, which has been in office since Tony Blair’s victory in May 1997, is now in serious danger of going down to defeat. Last weekend’s polls reported the Conservatives as having between 38 and 40 percent support from the electorate, with Labour about 31 percent and the Liberal Democrats in the area of 20 percent. In the last elections of 2005, Labour obtained 43 percent of the vote, the Conservatives 31 percent, and the Liberal Democrats 17 percent.
Labour seems unable to go much higher than its present projected number, but at the same time the Conservatives do not seem to be able to achieve any dramatic upward move from its present numbers. With the Liberal Democrats hovering around 20 percent, it is being suggested that they could well hold the balance of power in the next Parliament. In British parlance there is talk of a so-called “hung parliament” in which Labour could achieve the largest number of seats, but not enough to supersede the combined seats of the other two parties. In that situation Labour could try to rule on its own for a while, and then hold another general election not too far down the road. Or on the other hand, the Liberals could decide to support the Conservatives and put them in power; or alternatively, decide to support the Labour Party on certain conditions.
Either of these formulas would suggest a situation of uncertainty, which current British opinion might hardly wish to have go on for long. At the weekend conference of the Liberal Democrats, Mr Clegg was constantly being asked what he would do in the event of the election being a close call for both of the major parties, but he declined to give a positive answer. Mr Clegg well knows that if he took his party into a parliamentary alliance with Labour, he would be supporting a party which has suffered a systematic decline in electoral support and popularity since the last General Elections.
On the other hand, it is probably fair to say that the Liberal Democrats view the current Conservative Party leadership as somewhat opportunist, particularly in respect of the latter’s position on relations with Europe. The Liberal Democrats (formerly the traditional British Liberal party, with some defections over the years from both the Conservative and Labour) have always been strong supporters of European integration. But in line with Mrs Margaret Thatcher’s, and then last Conservative Leader William Hague’s ambivalent attitude to the EU, the current Conservative leadership under David Cameron recently took a decision to withdraw the party’s support from the mainstream conservative grouping in the European Parliament, and has promised the British people that any future changes to the European Union’s Treaty of Lisbon, will have to be put to them in a referendum. The Liberals see this stance as opportunist and not in line with their own commitment to Europe.
Gordon Brown, who fought hard to have Tony Blair pass on the Prime Ministership before and after the last general election, now finds himself placed in a situation in which nothing that he does induces the British people to consider his government viable, and worthy of another term (which would be Labour’s fourth). True, general opinion in Britain would seem to be that by the time Blair was ready to go, he was really handing Brown a poisoned chalice. For in spite of the infamous Anglo-American dominated alliance’s victory over Saddam Hussein in Iraq, the war never attained substantial popular support in Britain, many people coming to feel that in the first place they had somehow been tricked by the Bush-Blair combination into believing their justification for going to war – that Saddam Hussein possessed nuclear weapons. Nothing that has happened in Britain since has restored Blair’s credibility. And the recent Commission of Inquiry appointed by Gordon Brown, under Lord Chilcot, at which Blair and Brown gave evidence, has turned out to be, from a public opinion point of view, a damp squib.
Clearly, after the last General Elections whose result, in spite of their victory, was taken by the Labour Party as something of a disappointment, Brown seemed to think that his reputation as a successful Chancellor of the Exchequer responsible for the boom time of the last half of the 1990’s and the first half of this decade, would qualify him for the support of the British people. Brown had boasted then that Labour had brought the days of “boom and bust” of the British economy to an end. But as fate has had it, no sooner was he well seated in office than the American-led financial collapse and then economic recession descended on Britain. In spite of some notable efforts at preventing a major collapse of the British banking system, Brown has not been able to persuade the British electorate that he still has in his hand the economic magic wand that he waved in times past. And in the midst of all of this, Brown has had to deal with allegations, some now proven, that many of his own Members of Parliament, had misused expenses paid to them allegedly in the course of their duties. Labour, in matters of this kind, has always claimed a certain moral superiority over the Conservatives.
With the odds now favouring the Conservatives, the British people seem to be just waiting their turn. Yet it is not clear that they have much hope for a quick economic recovery under the Conservatives. The finance spokesperson for the Liberal Democrats perhaps put British expectations well at his Party’s weekend conference, when he observed that there will inevitably have to be serious economic cuts, but that they cannot be made right away as the economy needs to be give time to show signs of emergence from the depth of the current recession.
From that perspective, for us in the Caribbean it would appear to matter little who wins the next British General Elections.
