Word: labourers
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Britain's beleaguered Prime Minister Gordon Brown and his increasingly panicky Labour Party might have thought they bottomed out earlier this month, when the party lost the London mayoralty and suffered its most disastrous municipal election result across the country in decades. But yesterday it got even worse. The resurgent Conservatives stomped to victory in a by-election in Crewe, a working-class town in northwestern England that has been an unsinkable Labour bastion since World War II. The sheer size of the victory - 17.6% of the electorate switched from Labour to Tory since the last election...
...long, hopes Tory Leader David Cameron, who traveled four times to the Crewe constituency in the course of the short campaign triggered by the death of a long-time Labour stalwart, Gwyneth Dunwoody. Cameron praised the win of his party colleague, Edward Timpson, as evidence that Britain wants an end to "big, top-down, bossy, interfering government...
...Westminster palace coup is by no means an easy feat, nor a likely one. Complex Labour Party rules and regulations specify that a leadership contest can only happen if the Prime Minister quits or is challenged. There is no indication that Brown is ready to quit. A successful challenger would need the backing of 20% of Labour MPs (at least 71 on current standings). That is a hard number to attain even in the current climate. And even if a challenger emerged, it would fall to the Labour Party Conference in the autumn to decide, by a public vote...
...clear that anyone would want to take the poisoned chalice of the Labour leadership now, when there is a clear sense that Britain is hankering for a change at the top. For many, the best hope is that Brown will somehow lead the nation out of economic downturn - and the party out of the doldrums - over the next two years...
...would be naive and insulting and stupid to try and pretend this hasn't been a enormous blow for the Labour Party," says Labour MP Stephen Pound of the Crewe result. "But we're not going to turn it round by defenestrating our leader, or trying to go downmarket after the Tory vote. To get rid of the Prime Minister would simply underline any accusations of division in the party and utterly guarantee we would lose the next election." Hardly a ringing endorsement, but perhaps an indication that for better or worse, Brown could have more months or even years...