Word: labourers
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...billed as a crunch vote, one that the government couldn't afford to lose without fatally undermining the already rickety authority of Prime Minister Gordon Brown. Labour Party loyalists, keen to prevent a rebellion, pumped out that urgent message to persuade all their colleagues in Parliament to back an extension of the period terror suspects can be held without charge from 28 days to 42. The government scraped through with a victory so narrow that the larger questions over Brown's leadership have hardly been put to rest...
...concerned just with balancing civil liberties against the threat from terrorists, but also with a host of strategic calculations. The Conservatives were continuing a rebranding exercise, which Cameron initiated when he took over as leader in 2005, appropriating some of the values and preoccupations more traditionally associated with Labour, such as a focus on human rights. On the Labour benches, many of the Prime Minister's supporters worried that failure to win the day could precipitate an internal coup attempt against Brown. "Today was all about the durability of this government," said Jon Cruddas, a popular MP on the left...
...paper, Brown triumphed in both debates when the measure squeaked through by 315 votes to 306. Yet the government's knife-edge victory saw 36 Labour MPs, including former ministers, oppose the government, and relied on the support of nine members of the Northern Ireland Democratic Unionist Party. Brown and the DUP politicians have firmly rejected suggestions that their votes were secured through backroom deals. But there is no denying that government whips (MPs who act as the party's disciplinarians) worked up to the last minute cajoling and arm-twisting colleagues into toeing the party line...
...said Cruddas. The Labour leadership now hopes for time to regroup. They are crossing fingers that inquiries into possible breaches of rules on expenses by a few prominent Conservatives will dent the Tories' substantial lead in the polls. But fresh challenges are piling up thick and fast for Labour's hapless leader, including industrial action this weekend by tanker-truck drivers that could cause fuel shortages. Even as Brown breathed a sigh of relief over his narrow escape in the Commons, civil servants were briefing him about an embarrassing security breach in which secret government documents about al-Qaeda were...
Mike, who was an undergraduate at Oxford shortly before Blair, has been covering and writing about the former Prime Minister since 1984, when Blair was a young Labour member of the House of Commons. He has long been fascinated by the fact that Blair was known to be religious, something Mike says is rare in what he calls Britain's "aggressively secular society." Mike grew up in an intensely religious family in the suburbs of Liverpool--his father was on the national council of the Baptist church--and he says, "I think that probably gave me some sympathy...