Brown Ensures Britain Will Be U.S. Ally for Now

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The New York Sun

A last-minute decision by Gordon Brown not to call an election in the face of polls that showed he might have lost has left in place a prime minister who will serve alongside President Bush as a partner in the war on terror until the end of next year. But the damage caused by what some in Britain are describing as Mr. Brown’s indecision may ensure that the next president will have to deal with a Conservative prime minister, David Cameron.

The first test of Mr. Brown’s decision to carry on will come today, when he delivers a major speech to the House of Commons on Britain’s involvement in the Iraq war. Last week, after visiting Baghdad and Basra, Mr. Brown announced a further 1,000-troop reduction of British forces in Iraq. His assessment of how the war is progressing and his prognostications for the future of Iraq and whether Britain can ever withdraw all its troops is keenly awaited on both sides of the Atlantic.

The British electoral system allows Mr. Brown, as leader of the majority party in the Commons, to call an election when he wishes. As his poll numbers soared after taking over from Prime Minister Blair in June, a buoyant Mr. Brown allowed a head of steam to accumulate behind the idea that there might be a snap election in November.

His judgment now to put off that election until 2009, at least in the short term, is giving his Conservative opponents the chance to paint him as an indecisive chief executive, lacking in boldness and courage. The latest opinion survey of marginal constituencies, which provide the key to electoral success, showed Mr. Brown’s Labour Party six points behind the Conservatives. It was in the immediate wake of those figures, in an interview broadcast yesterday morning on BBC television, that Mr. Brown made his announcement that there would not, after all, be a fall election.

“I want to get on with the job of change in this country. And I believe I’ve got to show people that we’re implementing the changes in practice,” he said. “We would win an election in my view, whether we had it today, next week, or weeks after.”

He promised a lengthy and substantial Commons announcement on Iraq. “It’s a comprehensive statement about both security, political reconciliation, economic reconstruction, and there are other aspects of what we can do to improve both the security of our military forces and those who help us on the ground in Basra,” he said.

Mr. Brown’s decision to duck an election met with derision from his Conservative opponent, Mr. Cameron. “Everybody knows he’s not having an election because he thinks there’s a danger of losing it. … I think it will rebound on him very badly,” he said.

One recent national poll, for YouGov, shows that the Conservatives have leapt 9% in the two weeks that election fever has been at its most intense and in which the party has held its annual conference. At 41%, it recorded its highest score since 1992.

Last week the Conservatives announced two policies that they believe to be sure vote winners: a threshold of $2 million net assets before death duties are paid and the scrapping of stamp duty on home purchases for first-time buyers. Mr. Cameron’s main speech at the conference was well received by voters and commentators, not least for abandoning his written text in favor of an ex tempore rendition.

Political commentators from the left joined in mocking Mr. Brown’s decision. “I think it is a disaster because it goes against the image that Gordon Brown has set himself up as a solid, unflappable person who has been through, after all, bombs and floods and pestilence and all the rest of it, and all of a sudden it’s he himself who’s knocked himself out. … I think it does change the way Brown has to be from now on. I don’t think he can simply sit there being rather pompous and rather solid and terribly reliable,” a columnist for the pro-Labour Guardian newspaper, Polly Toynbee, told the BBC.

Mr. Brown is a historian of the Labour Party who has written a biography of a Glasgow socialist pioneer, James Maxton. Precedents for not calling an election when the thought of one has been encouraged have led to disaster for Labour in the past.

James Callaghan, who succeeded Harold Wilson as premier in 1976, declined an election in 1978, when he might have won, and instead was obliged to call a poll the following June, after a winter of industrial disputes, described in the British press, showing a rare flash of erudition, as his “Winter of Discontent.” He lost to Margaret Thatcher, whose party ruled for the next 13 years before being ousted by Mr. Blair.


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