British Premier Faces Party Rebellion Over Terrorism Vote
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.
LONDON — Prime Minister Brown approaches a key vote on anti-terrorism legislation today, facing rebellion within his Labor Party and some of the lowest approval ratings in modern British history.
A new poll in the Times newspaper of London yesterday shows Mr. Brown with just 25% approval ratings, mirroring a poll for the Sunday Telegraph over the weekend that put Mr. Brown’s support at 26%.
Since he took office just under a year ago, Mr. Brown has been battered by a wobbling economy, political missteps, and growing questions about his leadership. He is now saddled with lower poll numbers than any recent leader except the Conservative John Major, whose collapse in 1997 gave way to the current run of 11 years of Labor governments.
“These numbers are just ghastly for Brown,” a political analyst for the Times, Peter Riddell, said, noting that the two recent polls found 42% to 45% of respondents favoring the opposition Conservatives.
“I’ve been surprised,” a Labor member of Parliament, John Grogan, said in an interview. “He and the people around him have been curiously uncertain what they were going to use power for once they got it.”
Against that bleak political backdrop, and just ahead of hosting President Bush in London this weekend, Mr. Brown is engaged in one of the toughest legislative fights of his time in office.
Several prominent members of the Labor Party, including a former attorney general, Peter Goldsmith, have publicly opposed Mr. Brown’s proposal to extend the period police can hold terrorism suspects without charge to 42 from 28 days.
In a letter to Labor members of Parliament last weekend, Mr. Brown argued that the change was needed because the “terrorist threat today is radically different from that faced in the past.”
Mr. Brown said the last major police investigation involving the Irish Republican Army involved “one computer and a handful of floppy disks.” By contrast, he said, the investigation into an alleged plot to bomb trans-Atlantic airliners in 2006 involved 400 computers, 8,000 discs, and more than 25,000 exhibits, and led police to seven foreign countries.
