Is it over for Blair?

Well...we can hope.

http://observer.guardian.co.uk/focus/story/0,6903,1207977,00.html

As Labour MPs talk openly about life after Blair, Kamal Ahmed and Gaby Hinsliff look at the doubts hanging over his future as Prime Minister, and five distinguished commentators assess his position

Sunday May 2, 2004
The Observer

The latest parlour game for Labour backbenchers is to check a website predicting what would happen if a general election were held tomorrow.The site is called Financial Calculus and every few weeks it takes an amalgamation of the most recent polls and judges which parties will emerge triumphant at the election. For Tony Blair, its predictions are becoming increasingly gloomy.
Perusing the site last week, Labour MPs were told they were facing meltdown. A majority of 165 would be cut to just 24. More than 70 MPs would lose their seats and their livelihoods. Labour would be left with a small majority, facing a Parliament of knife-edge votes and regular defeats. The ghost of John Major would regularly hove into view.

Such bleak predictions are concentrating minds in the bars and restaurants of Westminster. Last week the talk was as open as it was disloyal. When will Blair go? Can he hang on until a general election? If he does, how much longer can he continue after an election victory? A year? Eighteen months? A whole third term?

Eleven days ago there was the referendum U-turn. Then the Government announced plans for identity cards, not universally welcomed on Labour's backbenches. Last Tuesday, Blair made a speech on immigration when he said that the Government would again 'get tough', a message that was construed as another U-turn. Then there is Iraq. Lack of progress on the Middle East. Problems are piling up at the Prime Minister's door.

Three of Blair's closest allies, Stephen Byers, Peter Mandelson and Alan Milburn, felt so concerned at the fall-out from the European issue that they wrote a joint article in the Guardian trying to shore up the Prime Minister. Blair appeared out of sorts, distracted, without his fabled 'grip' on events. The chattering about his future got louder.

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Every Englishman I ever knew with a brain would be appalled about this. It doesn't fit with the tradition of a country that created the Magna Carta 800 years ago.

Because the alternative party in England is the Conservative party...

'liberal' is usually not considered very left wing in most countries. Blair is so far to the right, though, that the British Liberal Party is now more to the left than him.

Replacing the PM now would leave enough time to the elections.

I still don't understand why Blair led the UK into Iraq, the "no WMD" report should have been his reason to resign.

I always thought Blair would be the first.

Amazing how history keeps repeating itself.

Maybe his Labour Party will replace him as leader. The colour of his face this week has turned from pink to bright red.

Don't try to threaten with Tory's.

is back in the labour camp now - and has more popularity on the ground than all the other politicians in the house put together...

How are things?
I don't understand politics in the UK.
All I can see is that chaos looms everywhere ...

yup, that's for sure, i got nearly mugged in my leafy highgate street last night, some dude jumped out of a car and attacked me with a crowbar! luckily he was pretty slow and kept missing and then i outran him and hid behind some bushes, world gone crazy, rudeboy! reckon i'd be safer in venezuela...

You need a stationary target with a heavy weapon like that.
:-)

I expect the mountains over towards Merida should be
pleasant this time of year, and most likely they have
fewer muggers.

Did you post anything from your latest excursion down
there?

...a coupla years ago, a coupla miles away, only then a very well-dressed man in a suit stepped out of a fancy car and threatened her with a machete! luckily she was on her shiny silver scooter which she battered him with and sped off on.

less muggers in merida, but watch out for the colombian tanks coming over the border! seriously tho, i expect it to get safer there and more dangerous here, so at some point the two lines on the graph will cross over...

didn't post anything from vz, except the little movie i made at the jan23 demo. recently did an interview with andy higginbottom from the colombian solidarity campaign outside coca-cola's HQ here in london: http://www.thenewagenda.org/killer-coke (quicktime req.)

great meeting on saturday with hands off venezuela camapign - they've really got the bolivarian process on the agenda for the trade unions in the UK, especially the NUJ (journos). also the GWS-inspired early day motion is coming along well with lots of signatures from MPs. bLiar's not on the list, tho...

I'm not much worried about those tanks, either.
I'll get back about the links later.
Rock on ...

He could have made going to war a lot less likely if he had stood up to Bush instead going along with what he knew was total bullshit.

the party leadership before the next election so that his party does not lose the election. Gordon Brown is in the wings waiting and ready.

.

From the London Observer (Sunday supplement of the Guardian Unlimited)
Dated Sunday May 2

"Blair to go" rumours shake Labour
Downing Street loyalists cannot quell whispers as just three out of 12 party chiefs back Prime Minister for full third term
By Kamal Ahmed, political editor

Tony Blair's future as Prime Minister is being openly questioned by some of his most senior MPs, as Downing Street fails to stamp on persistent rumours that he may quit.
The latest bout of soul-searching in the Labour Party comes as the Prime Minister makes yet another attempt to relaunch the Government's domestic agenda with a speech on education.
Blair will tell the National Association of Head Teachers' conference today that the Government is to focus its attention on children under five years old, with large amounts of new investment in nursery education.
But even last night Blair was still searching for a policy 'nugget' to offer the public or face having the speech dismissed as another reheating of old initiatives.

Read more.

the site they talk about (I been looking for one like it ever since the Daily Telegraph closed theirs down) is http://www.financialcalculus.co.uk/election/index.html
The current prediction, from a total of 646 seats, is based on:
Con 36.6% vote, 232 seats
Lab 34.7% vote, 335 seats
Lib 21.1% votes, 48 seats

So, with less votes than the Tories, Labour can still get more seats than all other parties combined. Labour may be better than the Tories, but you have to hate a system that can give such a distorted result.

The only good news I can see is the prediction for the Labour vote in my constituency: 0.91%! Take that, poodle! And the Lib Dems still win the seat.

I don't live in the US, but it is Presidential in my country too. We have proportional representation unlike the US and the UK, but I think I would give it up if I could get a parliamentary system!

Yes I know this is by Boris Johnson, but even this tory can provide a good explanation of why Blair is unfortunatly not about to go anywhere.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/main.jhtml?xml=%2Fopinion%2F2004%2F04%2F29%2Fdo2902.xml&secureRefresh=true&_requestid=54348

Blair will not go this summer, and no, he will not go before the next general election. Here are at least three reasons. The first is that it is not in the nature of politicians to surrender their own political lives; they are like wasps in jam jars. They buzz on long after hope has gone. They go on because it is in their nature to do so, because all political careers must end in tears, and it is profoundly in the public interest that they should do, in the sense that politicians will work hardest and best if they know that their only exit is to be terminated in the Darwinian struggle for popular affection and interest.

He will not go because there are scores of his backbenchers who know that they were not propelled to Westminster because their electorates fell in love with their own blue eyes. They know that Tony won their seats, because he offered Middle England a kind of Tory Lite party that seemed economically sensible without some of the nastiness that they had come to associate with my great party.

They also know that they have absolutely no practical way of disposing of Blair, because a leadership election would necessitate the votes of 80 MPs, a quarter of the parliamentary party, and there are not enough of them with the guts to trigger it.

And the third reason why Blair will stay and fight is of course that there is no one to take his place. He is New Labour, for better or worse. Straw? Pshaw. Blunkett? Junk it. As for Gordon Brown, and the idea that the baton could be smoothly passed to the Chancellor - cheated of his birthright for a mess of seared tuna at Granita - it is fanciful. Even if it were possible, technically, to effect such a transition, it would be an insult to democracy, not least because Brown, like so many other Labour members, sits for a Scottish seat, and is currently passing laws for England when English MPs have no say over those questions in Scotland, and above all when he, Gordon, has no say over those questions in Scotland. I would go so far as to say that the West Lothian question is now so acute that no sitting Scottish MP has a hope of becoming prime minister.

Thank you for the perspective

By the time the next election rolls around, people will barely remember Iraq. Provided that Kerry isn't hostile to European economic development (as Bush is) and is possibly even supportive of it (as Clinton was), people will only be thinking about how great life is in Europe. Labour wins again.

Thanks for sharing that.

Viewing the situation from this side of the Pond, there seem to be people who could assume the leadership of Labour. I may prefer Robin Cook, but the most likely alternative would be Gordon Brown. Is it really true that "there is no one to take (Blair's) place"?

'red' ken livingstone has recently been readmitted to the labour party (huggin and kissin with blair, much to the disgust to the 'left' here) and really is the only person that can give Labour a decent majority in the House which i guess they've got used to. anyone else will cut the majority down to normal democratic levels! that's what they're scared of, not losing to the tories (it can never happen under michael howard, wait til portillo takes over after the next general election) but losing their massive majority.

btw, livingstone is kinda like the chávez of the UK, or at least the closest thing we've got!

The only plausable alternative for most Labour people is Brown. I don't agree with the article about Devolution making it untenable for Scots to become PM but all the same Brown does not at all look about to stage some sort of coup d'etat.

As the article says, Blair is actually quite safe. Even if it is by a tory MP the argument holds and I am thinking of posting it in editorials just to show people how forlorn it is at present to speculate on Blair's demise.

That's f'ing precious.

unless he drops dead due to his dodgy heart, is assassinated by terrorists or else decides to resign to take up some cosy sinecure in the corporate world. The idea that the Labour Party will summon up the will and resolve to remove him is laughable. For a start they simply do not have a history of removing sitting leaders when they are past their sell by date. This sort of ruthlessness is the preserve of the Tory party who have no compunction about ousting their chiefs when they think they have become an electoral liability. The current bunch of Labour MPs are about as feeble and craven bunch of politicians as you will find anywhere in the world. They threatened rebellion three times over the shortcomings of Blair's policies on education, health and the war in Iraq but when it came to the crunch they have meekly backed him. I do not care if they are consigned to the dustbin of electoral history. With regards to the Tories, if they win the election they will find Blair has left them a very nasty poison pill in the form of the Scottish and Welsh assemblies. Should Howard be so foolish as to try to make his anti-European rhetoric into a reality and attempt to secede from the EU he could face the very real possibility of the break up of the United Kingdom. The Scots and the Welsh need only look at the example of Ireland to see how small independent countries can prosper within Europe. If such an event were to occur I think it would ultimately be beneficial to the English, since it would finally put an end to the ludicrous notion that their country is still a world power. They could then avoid the sort of post imperial delusions that has got them involved in the current debacle in the Middle East.

Two years from now, they'll probably still be asking themselves this question.

little creep ...:thumbsdown: t blair

next .. bu$h