Word: labour
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...Still, the election is a watershed. If Blair loses, it will be a spectacular upset. If he wins, he will be heading toward a historic first: two full terms of a Labour government and a run at a third. Blair doesn't want to look power-mad by talking about the next election, but it's already in his sights - and he knows that winning it will depend on visibly fixing what ails Britain. One Labour insider says that "politics in a second term will become quite mundane, focusing on the nitty-gritty of how hospitals, doctors' surgeries, classrooms work...
...There is another complicating factor: shifting political institutions and allegiances within the country. The Labour government sold the idea of a new Scottish Parliament and Welsh Assembly as ways to strengthen the Union. It may be having the opposite effect. Though most English approve of this devolution, there are strains. Scottish M.P.s at Westminster can vote on English laws, for example, but English M.P.s have no vote on many Scottish matters. There is also irritation that the Scots, unlike the English, now only pay their university fees once they start earning. A recent survey found that 17% of people...
...serious, policy-driven young man who can argue for hours in a windowless conference room about the fine points of progressive taxation. He is also seriously charming, disarmingly direct and an unusual marriage of fresh thinker and hustling entrepreneur. In his previous life, he organized rock concerts for Labour, consulted on telecommunications, wrote books and founded the respected Third Way think tank Demos. After working for Blair at Downing Street, where he helped launch programs to cut poverty and unemployment, he became an officially nonpartisan civil servant last year in charge of 63 people trying to make government work smarter...
Four years ago, the election campaign was an exciting affair - edgy, full of the possibility of big changes, yet still uncertain. The polls consistently predicted an easy Labour victory, but there were still those who doubted. Although the Conservatives were trailing Labour by up to 20 points, just as they have been during this campaign, the Tories themselves took comfort from the 1992 election results, when they outfoxed the polls that gave Labour a 1% lead and won by a small margin...
...derided then admired. It was obvious that he still believed he might just win. The Tories, though exhausted, still had some of their 'big beasts' - politicians like former Deputy Prime Minister Michael Heseltine and former Chancellor Kenneth Clarke - fronting their campaign and giving it a buzz. Most important, New Labour was a reinvented party that hadn't yet fully revealed itself. Full of zest, it opened the prospect of stimulating change to Britain's tired plitical scene, fuelling the adrenalin of journalists covering the campaign. All this unknown territory was stimulating stuff...