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Busy 1st month on job for Brown
25/07/2007 14:15 - (SA)
London - Failed car bombings, a chill in Anglo-Russian relations, the worst floods for 60 years and plans for sweeping constitutional reform: Gordon Brown's first month as British prime minister has been eventful.
Yet the former finance minister has by most accounts acquitted himself well in his new role, which he assumed from Tony Blair on June 27 after years of waiting increasingly impatiently in the wings.
Coming into the job after a decade as Blair's right-hand man, Brown has had to carve out his own niche that was neither too radically different nor too similar to his predecessor.
Nearly one month on, the 56-year-old Scot is ahead in the polls, benefiting from a honeymoon "bounce" which an ICM survey for The Guardian suggested was even swaying backers of the main opposition Conservative Party.
Balancing act
"I think he's done a marvellous balancing act," George Jones, emeritus professor of government at the London School of Economics, told AFP.
"He's managed to get over to the British people that there has been a change in government. That's important because the Tories can't say that it's time for a change. Brown has spiked their guns."
Brown has pledged a change in style rather than substance from Blair's progressive centre-left model and a "new government with new priorities".
On the domestic front, he has appointed Britain's first female interior minister, the youngest foreign secretary since 1977, the first husband and wife in Cabinet and the first siblings in the "inner circle" since the late 1920s.
He was praised for his measured response after three car bombs threatened carnage in London and Glasgow just days into his premiership.
Reform proposals
His constitutional reform proposals won plaudits because of plans to hand to lawmakers powers traditionally reserved to the executive such as the right to declare war.
And he broke new ground by proposing Britain's first written constitution and setting out his legislative programme for public consultation months ahead of the traditional Queen's Speech to both houses of parliament in November.
Elsewhere, there have been proposals for a new house building programme, bolstering the state-run National Health Service and education system, plus indications he wants a rethink on "supercasinos" and cannabis classification.
Brown also passed his first electoral tests with flying colours last week, securing two by-elections for the governing Labour Party, including the seat vacated by Blair when he was named international envoy for the Middle East.
Change has been less detectable abroad, notably on the divisive issue of Britain's presence in Iraq, and he has dismissed claims he is trying to distance London from Washington.
But London's planned expulsion of four diplomats over Russia's refusal to extradite the chief suspect in the poisoning death of former Kremlin agent Alexander Litvinenko was praised as "robust".
Capturing 'Middle England'
Critics say Brown is keen to capture "Middle England" with the next general election at most three years away and is pushing an agenda designed to appeal to readers of the right-of-centre Daily Mail newspaper.
For the Tories, Brown has failed to live up to his promise to banish the media manipulation or "spin" that characterised - and some say tarnished - the Blair years.
They claim he has not been true to his pledge of restoring parliamentary primacy, accusing him of leaking names of ministerial appointments and his legislative programme to the media.
And most of all, they - and the smaller Liberal Democrats - say many of his policies are no different from those announced when he was chancellor of the exchequer.
"So far we have merely seen a change of tone, not a change of substance," Lib Dem leader Menzies Campbell's chief of staff Edward Davey told AFP.
Real change would mean withdrawing British troops from Iraq, abandoning the "headlong rush" towards a new generation of nuclear power stations and taxing pollution rather than earnings, he added.
- AFP
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