Things are looking grim for the British Prime Minister. With opinion polls in the toilet and a drubbing expected at mid-term elections tomorrow, a cabinet reshuffle was expected. But a number of cabinet ministers have chosen to resign in advance rather than be reassigned, for “more time with their faimly”, “to go back to their constituency roots”, the usual bollocks. Obviously, the truth is that they were going to be moved sideways or downwards or out, and are deliberately distancing themselves from the possibly doomed leader. Some of them have already been manoeuvring in this fashion for a while, of course.
All of this is on top of the MP’s expenses scandal, which has hurt the governing party more than the others.
They’re talking now of the real possibility of a Labour putsch in the next few days. Brown resigns, Labour do a quick leader election, and somebody like Alan Johnson becomes PM.
The question: do you think this is likely? How would the leadership contest shake out? Will the people accept a second unelected PM within a single parliament, or will an immediate general election be necessary?
As angry as people seem to be over there, I can’t see any major leadership changes going unchallenged. A no-confidence vote would follow pretty quickly, were I to guess.
I don’t think there’s anyway Labour’s going to win the next general election (whenever that’ll be). They’ll be lucky to wind up the Official Opposition.
There is no such thing as an elected or unelected PM. We vote for our local MP and the PM is whoever can command a majority of them. There is no requirement at all for a new PM to face a General Election.
Brown will hang on to the bitter, last-minute end I suspect.
On paper that is true, but voters know, and take into account, who would be PM, when they vote. Take the 1987 election - a lot of the Labour posters and literature didn’t say “Labour”, it said “Kinnock” (probably a mistake, in hindsight :)). The party leader is a big part of why we vote for a party, and to have two successive PMs who haven’t in this sense been chosen by the electorate would not go down well, I think.
They generally face leadership elections within their own party, of course, which Gordon Brown did not. And while it’s true that there’s no official requirement for a general election after a leadership change, in practice the pressure for one, were Brown to be ousted, would be almost irresistible. A PM has to have some sort of mandate, and at this point it’s hard to see a factionalised Labour Party mustering sufficient coherence to deliver a strong enough leader to see out the year.
I suspect Brown will indeed hang on, at least until the winter, but if today’s elections go as disastrously for Labour as predicted things could unravel very quickly.
The Tories are actually quite keen for Brown to stay in power until the next election.
Their biggest worry is that Alan Johnson will take over and give himself a one-year mandate to lead the country through to the election in 2010.
Gordon Brown is the Tories’ biggest asset at the moment - with him in power it keeps Labour divided, meaning good news for David Cameron. But a new leader provides some temporary unity and could galvanise Labour support to get out and campaign… with Brown at the helm Labour grassroots remain dejected and unfocused.
That’s why the Tories are pushing for an election if Brown goes, but they will hope his departure (if it’s soon) is a “big bang” which will force an election, rather than a managed handover which would give Labour time to regroup.
While I in no way wish harm on them, I wonder whether a convenient illness for one of GB’s children could provide a face-saving reason to step down in the next week or so.
Maybe but the point stands the electorate; or more to the point - the right-wing media echo chamber - have no right to expect an election when a new PM is chosen.
Anyone who votes for an MP based on who is leading their party at that time is a fool. Anyway - I think most people vote on the basis of party not party leader. But all that is moot. Jesus Christ could come down in a cloud of fire and assume the Labour Party leadership and they’d still get crushed at the next election whenever it is held.
I don’t see why; one’s vote in a general election has an effect on multiple outcomes, one of which is the choice of PM. Given the undeniable shift of executive power towards No. 10 since Blair, it would be foolish not to consider this when making your vote.
Yes it would be foolish because the leader of the party is not the party and the differences between parties are much bigger than the difference between different potential leaders within a party. Parties circumscribe the room leaders have to work in as they have to be able to command a majority for their legislation.
I think there’s a very real chance Brown will be forced to go, with the expected shellacking at the polls being the tipping point. Really, though, it’s the cabinet fragmentation that appears to have done the damage. Home secretary gone, chancellor under pressure - although even the tit in the street is growing tired of the expenses hand-wringing exercise so he may survive. It’s kind of a fiasco for a fiasco-prone government.
I don’t know whether the public would wear another un-elected leader. Alan Johnson has obvious strengths as a back-to-basics, politician-as-human being style PM, but he’s entirely unproven at that level. The opposition is so weak that it makes it hard to predict how things will go. The fact that GB is still in #10 at all attests to the pusillanimity if the Tories, unless it’s all an elaborate ruse to swerve the captaincy of a sinking ship…
But this doesn’t change the fact that your vote is the only say you have in the process that will directly lead to the next PM, and that the leader of the winning party at a general election is almost certain to be PM for the majority of the term. Pretending that this has no relevance is just daft; the PM holds executive as well as legislative power, a great deal of which requires no parliamentary consent for him or her to wield.
Even from a legislative perspective, the PM sets the agenda for what legislation is brought to a vote, and wields considerable power over the parliamentary party in getting it through. This set of MPs would have passed completely different legislation under, say, a Peter Hain leadership. At the last election I voted with a local perspective, as my Labour candidate was Sadiq Khan, former chair of Liberty, and noted opponent of ID cards and extended detention without charge. Since taking his seat, he has voted nine times in favour of ID cards and the national database, and once in favour of 42 days’ detention without charge. When a party can be Whipped into voting the leadership’s line, is it really sensible to pretend that the choice of leadership is an irrelevance?
I don’t think you can overestimate the fury that voters feel about the scandal of Members of Parliament (MPs) padding their expense accounts.
I live in a small town, yet people I barely know have been talking about how our MP should resign (and the rest of them).
Here’s a typical story - an MP claimed £13,000 ($21,000) in expenses to help pay a mortgage for his second home. He’d already paid the mortgage off. :smack:
Three members of the Cabinet (the ruling body, chaired by the Prime Minister) out of twenty-three resigned earlier this week over cheating on their expenses.
Gordon Brown simply doesn’t have any authority left - although there’s not exactly any candidates of quality to replace him either.
No. People who ignore the constitutional reality for their own made up one have no expectations that need to be pandered for. We vote for the party we want to lead by voting for the MP. We do not have a presidential system and even under most of those you don’t get an election if the incumbent dies or retires.
Voting purely on the personality who happens to be leading a party rather than voting on the party proposals is just plain ignorant.
People can by all means vote out of ignorance but that does not mean parties or governments should pander to that ignorance or the media should whip up self-serving right-wing hysteria on the basis of it.
There’s no reason for an election just because a party changes its leader.
I’d rather get a chance to see what the new leader does for 11 months and much as I dislike this government I’m not voting for Cameron just because he looks better on U-Tube than Brown.
I’ll be voting for the party that I believe would be best for the whole country in the current circumstances.
And that is not the Tories with their back-to-the-30’s Hooverian economics even if that Mr Cameron seems like a decent sort of cove.
Who said “personality”? Not me. The leader has the main input on the current proposals, and will have the most input on future proposals. To treat him as a simple cog in the machine is stupid; he is the prime mover. Further, I could just as easily argue that voting for a party is constitutionally ignorant; you vote merely for a person, who happens to be a member of that party at the present time. No by-election is necessary if he switches sides mid-term. So you shouldn’t really pay any attention to which party your MP belongs to, right?
Nice strawman. You seem to be arguing against giving weight to trivial aspects of personality. I’m arguing in favour of giving due consideration to the leaders’ beliefs, principles and aptitudes.
I quite agree, we do not have a presidential system; it is precisely for this reason that the office of PM takes on more significance than it would otherwise, and this is why considering (among other things) who will be PM is essential. I am not saying it should be the only consideration, or even that it should be an overriding one; merely that it is negligent to ignore who will occupy the most important office in the land, at the only time you have any chance to express an opinion.
I’d agree - Thatcher and Blair set the entire tone of their administrations, so the point where they each ended up with an “-ism” attached to them.
Now that Brown has bottled moving Alistair Darling from No. 11, I reckon he will now limp on until May next year. The Labour party know that an election now would wipe them out, and removing Brown would pretty much force the issue based on the public mood.
James Purnell’s resignation did not prompt a mass movement for Brown’s departure, and the fact that Darling remains Chancellor means the trigger of his resignation from the cabinet (and Milliband’s support) takes a lot of steam away from the anti-Brown camp.
Labour under Brown were no different to Labour under Blair. Blair and Brown are leaders because they embody the desires of the party as expressed through the leadership election. The difference is only that Blair was a better media performer and political tactician. They shared the same beliefs etc etc. Which are not those of the leaders of other parties.
Even to the extent that this is true, which is to say “not entirely,” it’s because Blair and Brown forged the coalition that is New Labour together, and created its policies and directions between the two of them. Power was centralised in their offices to an unprecedented level, even to the point of marginalisation of the cabinet. So it’s hardly surprising that Brown did not instantly set about dismantling what Blair had wrought; it was his project, too. And indeed, this is why the country at large paid very little attention to calls for a general election after Blair’s resignation; the country had voted for Blair and Brown, in the full knowledge of what they were getting.
To claim that this is typical of leadership changes is insupportable, though. It’s plain that if Brown were to be ousted now, calls for a general election would be almost unanswerable. I suspect that’s why he’s relatively likely to hang on in sickly style; no-one wants to lead Labour into what is almost certain to be electoral annihilation.
The local election results were bad for Labour; it’s going to be interesting to see the Euro election results. I’ve a feeling they won’t be as bad as minor parties will have split the opposition vote.