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Blair faces vital election test
30/04/2006 14:43 - (SA)
Beth Gardiner
London - Prime Minister Tony Blair has already fought his last national campaign, but British voters will get another chance to have a say on him at the polls this week.
Britons around the country will choose local council members and other municipal officials Thursday in elections bound to be seen as a precursor to the national vote expected in 2009.
Blair has said he won't seek re-election then, but he still has a lot at stake in the coming vote - a poor showing for his Labour Party could intensify calls for him to step aside soon so his likely successor, treasury chief Gordon Brown, can take over.
The prime minister has suffered through a difficult couple of months and his poll ratings are sagging badly. Support for Labour hit 32%, its lowest point in 19 years, in one recent poll.
"It's the worst possible timing for the Labour Party," said Geoff Andrews, a politics expert at the Open University.
The elections are also the first test of opposition Conservative Party leader David Cameron, whose youthful looks and promises of change helped boost the Tories' ratings when he took charge in December.
But they've sagged since then and the party is now only just ahead of Labour, nowhere near the dominant position opposition parties generally need a few years before they unseat a government.
Also hoping for gains on local councils is the far-right British National Party, which could benefit from the government's acknowledgment this week that it had failed to consider whether more than 1 000 foreign criminals freed from British jails should have been deported.
Key issues
Crime and immigration are key political issues so the revelation about the releases - which has prompted calls for the resignation of Home Secretary Charles Clarke, a key Blair ally - could hurt Labour candidates.
"It feels scary knowing these people are walking the streets," said Margaret Murphy, an Irish-born west London pub worker who said she planned to vote for the anti-immigrant party. "How many rapists and murderers has (Clarke) let loose?"
On the same day last week that Clarke faced a brutal grilling in the House of Commons, deputy prime minister John Prescott acknowledged he'd had an extramarital affair with his secretary and Health Secretary Patricia Hewitt was booed and jeered by a roomful of nurses over layoffs in the public health service.
That comes on top of a police investigation of allegations that Blair and other political leaders gave out nominations to the House of Lords and honors like knighthoods in exchange for financial backing of their parties.
Blair denies the charge, which followed Labour's admission that it received millions of pounds in undisclosed loans from wealthy backers.
Voters around England will elect representatives to fill 4 360 council seats in all 32 London boroughs and 144 other local authorities.
Cameron
The elections are the first chance for Cameron, 38, who is overhauling the Conservative Party after three successive national election defeats, to show his strategy of shifting to the centre is working.
He's pushing hard on the environment and global warming, issues not traditionally associated with his party, long seen as a friend of big business and the wealthy.
He's been urging voters to "Vote blue (the Tories' colour), go green" and hopes the approach will draw back young voters who have deserted the Conservatives. Labour retorted with a cartoon ad calling him "Chameleon Dave" and accusing him of inconsistency.
A poor Conservative showing could embolden critics on the right of the party who feel Cameron is dragging them too close to the centre.
But with Labour voters dispirited - and some still angry over the Iraq war - low turnout may give the Tories a boost.
"There will be judgments made on the basis of these elections on Mr. Blair and his future, Mr. Cameron and how well he's doing," said Tony Travers, a politics expert at the London School of Economics.
"They are genuinely local contests ... but it doesn't mean that they won't also be used as this grand-scale national opinion poll to throw some light" on the parties' prospects for 2009.
- SAPA
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