His name doesn’t appear on any ballots, but when Britain’s voters go to the polls on Thursday, Prime Minister Tony Blair will be facing the electorate for the last time. Many see the local elections as a final popular verdict on Blair’s premiership, which is expected to end in the coming weeks.
On Tuesday, he told British TV that he will make a ”definitive” statement next week on his future.
”A significant number of people will use this vote as a protest vote — not against a party, but against Tony Blair,” said Dave Edler, a 44-year-old actor and candidate for the Green Party in a constituency near Bath, about 185km west of London.
A decade after he was first elected in 1997 — the youngest prime minister since 1812 — support for Blair has fallen. The era of ”Cool Britannia” is over, and the unpopular war in Iraq, Blair’s closeness to United States President George Bush, and a scandal involving allegations that political honors were traded for cash have dogged his premiership.
Speculation over when he would leave has become a national pastime.
Even so, Blair can boast a formidable record in his nearly 10 years in power: Britain’s longest stretch of post-war prosperity, national healthcare reforms, and successful peace efforts in Northern Ireland are all achievements on which Labour can campaign.
More than 10 000 local council seats are being contested in England. In Scotland, voters are choosing their local representation as well as the Scottish Parliament, which sits in Edinburgh and deals with Scotland-only issues. And in Wales, voters will elect their national assembly, which sits in Cardiff.
In Scotland, Blair’s Labour Party will be fighting off a challenge from the pro-independence Scottish National Party (SNP), which has no less a star than Edinburgh-born Sean Connery endorsing its platform.
‘Despised’
Blair has urged voters not to turn to the SNP just to give him ”a kicking one last time on my way out of the door”. But party leader Alex Salmond said that Blair — along with the war in Iraq and the decision to replace Britain’s nuclear deterrent — is one of the issues voters want to talk about.
”Blair is nowhere liked. He’s despised, in fact,” Salmond told the Associated Press in Selkirk, Scotland. ”It’s one of the factors.”
A poll, conducted for the Independent newspaper in late April, said nationwide support for Labour stood at 27% compared with 36% for the opposition Conservatives. (The poll reflected responses from 615 people, which would have a margin of error of plus or minus four percentage points.) The paper said it was the lowest showing for Labour since 1983.
The disfavour of Blair and Labour may also be down to their longevity in office, said Tony Travers, a professor of government at the London School of Economics.
”The British electorate has become fed up with a government that has been in power for a long time,” Travers said. ”They don’t like over-powerful prime ministers in power for too long; they don’t like governments of one party in power for too long.”
Voters seemed to agree that it was simply time for a change.
”I’ve been impressed by Blair, but I think he’s run his course and it’s probably time for a change,” taxi driver Victor Aldridge said last week in the Leeds suburb of Roundhay, about 320km north of London.
Losses
If Labour does rack up significant losses in these polls, it will give additional momentum to David Cameron’s re-energised Conservative Party, which hopes to gain power in elections likely to be held in 2009 or 2010. The local ballots, Travers said, are a way of ”testing the Cameron affect”.
How the electorate reacts to Gordon Brown, the current Treasury chief who is nearly a lock to take over for Blair, will also be dissected. Brown himself told ITV News the electorate will be ”voting on all of us” — not just Blair — when they mark their ballots.
But the treasury chief isn’t considered as much of a factor in these elections as the prime minister, said Patrick Dunleavy, a political scientist at the London School of Economics.
”In the local elections, the Brown camp will say this is the last chance for voters to kick Tony Blair,” Dunleavy said. ”The Conservatives will say this is a vote against Gordon Brown because he’s already considered to be the leader in waiting. It’s really a bit hard to tell, but I would think most voters are a little bit retrospective.” — Sapa-AP