Word: labour
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Blair is now the most unpopular Labour Party Prime Minister since World War II, with a 26% approval rating. In local elections two weeks ago, Labour took a drubbing, slumping to third place behind the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats. Blair has already said he will step down during this Parliament--effectively, no later than 2009--to make room for his heir apparent, Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown. But a third of voters want Blair to go now, and the political village at Westminster is so consumed with succession gossip that his stature shrinks more every...
...stonewalled reporters about exactly when he would depart 10 Downing Street and fielded clunky ripostes to the zingers of the new Conservative leader, David Cameron, he seemed a different man from the vigorous, fresh-faced powerhouse who rode a landslide to office in 1997. Only a year after winning Labour's first consecutive third term in office, he is being drenched in a storm of public disdain. "Blair should go and give a different leader a chance," says Josie Brown, a mature student in London, over lunch in the park. "I think he should have gone a long time...
...from outgoing Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi. Home Secretary Charles Clarke was forced out when it was revealed that his department had ignored repeated warnings that dangerous foreign prisoners were being released when their sentences were up rather than being considered for deportation. And Scotland Yard is examining whether Labour Party figures may have effectively sold places in the House of Lords to people who made big loans or donations to the party...
...National Health Service, for instance, has absorbed huge amounts of new money under Labour, and many health indicators are improving. But lots of hospitals are having to lay off staff because they've overspent; many doctors and nurses say the NHS is badly run. Meanwhile, Blair is pushing to let state schools have greater autonomy, which traditional Labour MPs think will lead to sharply unequal quality and hurt those at the bottom of the social ladder...
...power and influence between the Blair and Brown camps. Though the men don't have deep differences over policy, what they do have is a major personality clash - one that pits two deeply ambitious men, who have been joined for 20 years in a common enterprise of making the Labour Party powerful, against each other. They respect and need each other, but they are also clearly sick of the weird political marriage that has tied them together over the years...