Brown Visits Queen, Election Set for May 6

The fact that there would be a general election in Britain on May 6, 2010, was the worst kept secret on the planet. This morning around 10 am, Prime Minister Gordon Brown hopped into a Jaguar and was driven the mile from 10 Downing Street to Buckingham Palace. There, he asked the Queen to dissolve Parliament and name May 6 as polling day. Parliament rises on Monday, but the campaign began some time ago.

For Gordon Brown and Labour, the battle is of the uphill variety. After 13 years in power, Labour is more or less out of ideas and is starting to feel like a guest who won't go home. The one card the party has to play is the economy; voting for Labour is voting for experienced hands to safeguard the fragile recovery. Of course, the riposte is that Labour's policies helped cause the financial meltdown in the first place.

For the Conservatives, this is their election to lose. They have led in the public opinion polls for months, and under David Cameron, they have gone a long way in ridding themselves of the label "nasty party," without really changing their policies. The trouble for the Tories is that they are the Tories, a party of the well-off, by the well-off, for the well-off. Winning the working-class vote without the Falklands Factors behind them is going to be tough. And in those areas where the UK Independence Party and the British National Party are campaigning, the Conservatives may lose votes on their right. Still, change is easier for an opposition party to promise than for a party that has governed for 13 years.

As for the Liberal Democrats, this is their election to change Britain. Their hope is that no party wins a majority and that they keep enough of their 63 seats to hold the balance of power. The price for their support will be a referendum on proportional representation. Their problems arise after the election. The Tories won't accept the referendum, and backing Labour would mean keeping the unpopular Mr. Brown in Number 10. Solving this problem, though, would ensure that the LibDems establish a voting system that gives them the power in future that their vote count has always merited.

For the next month, the world will be awash in British opinion polls. To help decipher what they mean, this journal recommends an interactive tool from UK Polling Report. It deduces the number of seats a party will win based on the national polling. It is a bit imprecise because the Conservatives tend to stack up huge majorities while Labour and the Liberal Democrats tend to spread their votes out nationally. Still, it's a useful device.

For readers in the UK, here are some dates to remember: April 15, the first debate among Messrs Brown, Cameron and Clegg on ITV; April 20, nominations close and this is the last day to register to vote or to request a postal ballot; April 22, the second debate on Sky; April 29 last debate on BBC; May 6 polling day, polls open from 7 am to 10 pm.

© Copyright 2010 by The Kensington Review, Jeff Myhre, PhD, Editor. No part of this publication may be reproduced without written consent. Produced using Ubuntu Linux.

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