An official with
Prime
Minister Gordon Brown's Labour Party says the U.K. leader will
confirm Tuesday that Britain's first national election in five years
will take place May 6.
Brown will travel to
Buckingham Palace to ask
Queen Elizabeth II for
permission to dissolve
Parliament
and call the first national vote since 2005.
The official demanded anonymity to discuss the
announcement in advance.
The election could end in Brown's ouster three years
after he succeeded
Tony
Blair as leader. The main opposition
Conservative Party — which leads in
opinion polls — hopes to
win power for the first time in 13 years.
Several polls suggest
Britain could have a hung Parliament, in
which no party has an
absolute
majority, for the first time since 1974.
THIS IS A BREAKING NEWS UPDATE. Check back soon for
further information. AP's earlier story is below.
LONDON (AP) — At last, Britain is about to get an
election date.
Prime
Minister Gordon Brown is expected Tuesday to play his hand, pay a
visit to Queen Elizabeth II and name a date for the first national vote
since 2005 — almost certainly May 6.
For Brown, appreciated by some but widely unloved,
election day could mark
the ignominious end of a three-year term beset by division within his
party, relentless media sniping and the near-collapse of the British
economy.
Defeat would end a British political era begun with
Tony Blair's landslide 1997 election victory, which returned the
Labour Party to office
and brought an unprecedented three successive election triumphs for the
center-left party.
Britain's Conservatives — the party of
Margaret Thatcher and
Winston Churchill — hope to win a national election for the first time
since 1992.
Brown's Labour Party is as much as 10 points behind
the
Conservatives
and their articulate but untested leader,
David Cameron, in some opinion polls. But
an unusual electoral map means the outcome is still uncertain and some
cracks are beginning to show in the Conservatives' modern facade.
An ICM poll published late Sunday by The Guardian
newspaper showed Labour closing in on its main rival — climbing four
points to 33 percent with the opposition Tories down one point with 37
percent.
"The
Conservative
Party and its supporters really must understand the scale of the
battle they have to fight," former Conservative
deputy prime minister Michael Heseltine told
BBC radio.
Whoever ends up running the debt-plagued nation will
face restive unions and a population that will be asked to contribute
more and receive less.
Britain's recession-wracked economy and enormous debt
are likely to dominate the
election campaign. Both Labour and
Conservatives say they will trim spending and slash the country's 167
billion pound ($250 billion) deficit — but they differ on how deep, and
how soon, to make cuts.
The Tories say they will reverse Labour's planned
hike to national insurance, a payroll tax paid by employees and
employers, and implement about 6 billion pounds in spending cuts this
year. Labour says major cuts should be deferred until next year to give
the economy more time to recover.
In a podcast on the prime minister's Web site Monday,
Brown said Conservative plans to cut public spending could tip the
economy back into recession.
Brown compared the economy to injured soccer star Wayne Rooney, saying
that "after an injury, you need support to recover. ... If you withdraw
support too early, you risk doing more damage."
The Conservatives countered with an election poster showing a single
green shoot emerging from a bleak landscape — with a boot bearing the
words "Job Tax" preparing to stamp on it.
"The choice in this election is very, very clear. You have either got
Labour stamping out the recovery, stamping on the green shoots, or the
Conservatives avoiding the jobs tax," Conservative Treasury spokesman
George Osborne said.
Britain must hold
an election by June 3. Brown is expected to announce Tuesday that it
will be held May 6 — when elections for town halls are already scheduled
to take place, traveling to
Buckingham Palace to ask
Queen Elizabeth II to
dissolve
Parliament
so campaigning can start.
For all the posturing, the major parties agree on many issues. They
would keep British troops in Afghanistan and seek to preserve the
so-called "special relationship" with the U.S.
Britain's next government must make sharp cuts to services, complete
political reforms following a scandal over lawmakers' inflated and
fraudulent expenses claims, and public sector unions — sensing the
looming cuts — are in militant mood and threatening strikes.
"Our message to the politicians should be simple — if you're coming for
our jobs, our pensions, our services and our education, we are going to
stand together and we are going to defend them,"
Mark Serwotka,
general secretary of the
Public and Commercial
Services Union — which represents about 300,000 people — said
Monday.
Voter anger could benefit small and fringe parties in the election,
including the Greens and the racist
British National Party — neither of whom
currently hold a House of Commons seat.
Politicians are also waiting to see whether a more U.S.-style,
personality-centered campaign — including the first-ever televised
debates between the leaders of Labour, the Conservatives and the
third-placed
Liberal
Democrats — will help build interest in the campaign.
The Conservatives,
who have consistently led in
opinion polls for more than two years, hope
voter weariness with Brown's Labour — in power since 1997 — will propel
them to victory.
And the party itself has changed, at least on the surface. The
43-year-old Cameron has sought to replace his party's fusty, right-wing
image with a more modern brand of "
compassionate Conservatism," and drawn more
women and members of ethnic minorities to a party long dominated by
affluent white men like himself.
With his bicycle riding, informal "call me Dave" manner and young family
— his wife Samantha is expecting their fourth child in September —
Cameron resembles Labour's former savior
Tony Blair, who swept his party back to
power in 1997. Many
Britons
sympathized with the Camerons over the death in 2009 of their eldest
child, 6-year-old Ivan, who suffered from cerebral palsy and a rare and
severe epilepsy condition.
Last week, Labour deployed Blair himself to challenge Cameron's supposed
likeness. In his first domestic political speech since leaving office
in 2007, Blair accused the
opposition party of lacking principles,
saying the Conservative election slogan "vote for change" begged the
question: "Change to what exactly?"
The party's modern new image suffered a blow Saturday when home affairs
spokesman
Chris Grayling
was recorded saying Christian bed-and-breakfast owners should be
allowed to turn away gay couples.
Gay rights groups
called for Grayling to be fired and
Business Secretary Peter Mandelson said the
remarks — secretly recorded at a meeting of a right-of-center think
tank last week — showed the Tories had not changed. "When the camera is
on they say one thing and when the camera is off they say another,"
Mandelson said.
Osborne said Grayling would keep his job, and like other senior Tories
had voted for legislation banning discrimination on the grounds of
sexual orientation.
But the episode adds to Conservative jitters about an election many
predict will end without an outright winner.
Because of the quirks of Britain's
electoral system, the
Conservatives need a
large swing to ensure a majority of House of Commons seats. Labour
traditionally wins more seats in urban areas, which usually contain
fewer voters and have a lower turnout than in rural voter districts —
dominated by the Conservatives.
The Conservatives lost the 2005 election despite taking a bigger share
of the popular vote than Labour.
Many recent
opinion polls
suggest the election may result in a hung Parliament, in which no party
has an
absolute majority,
for the first time since 1974. Depending on the result, Brown or
Cameron is likely to attempt to form a
coalition government, or plan for a second
election later this year.
Cameron said Sunday that a hung Parliament would damage British
interests and create uncertainty at a time of economic difficulty.
The ICM poll published Sunday questioned 1,001 adults. No
margin of error was
given, but is typically plus or minus three percent in similar samples.
David Mikael Taclino
Inyu Web Development and Design
Creative Writer
The pitch sailed high to 
