ShareThisA stumbling, debt-ravaged economy, a scandal-shocked and disillusioned electorate and three candidates who have never run for prime minister before. With all this, Britain is facing one of the most chaotic and unpredictable elections in its history.
Only seconds after Prime Minister Gordon Brown, 59, stepped out of Buckingham Palace to ask the Queen to dissolve Parliament in preparation for a May 6 vote, the strange novelty of this campaign was clear.
His two 43-year-old opponents, Conservative David Cameron and Nick Clegg, leader of the resurgent Liberal Democrats, broke tradition by pre-empting Brown's Downing Street announcement with their own informal appearances before multihued crowds of young people.
For the next four weeks, the candidates will seek above all to avoid looking like established British politicians: Britain's economic catastrophe and a string of MP expense-account scandals have rendered the old politics untouchable. Brown, a former finance minister whose job was given to him by Tony Blair, is an unknown quantity as a national campaigner, as are his two opponents.
The election is thus Britain's first in almost 20 years with an unpredictable outcome, and the first in almost 40 that might not produce a majority. The sense of novelty is compounded by a string of innovations, such as the first televised candidates' debates in British history.
True, Cameron's Tories will almost certainly win the most seats; they have held a lead of between 4 and 10 percentage points over Labor for most of the past year.
But most analysts believe the Conservatives would need a 10-point lead to win a majority. And Brown reportedly plans to continue governing even if Labor wins fewer seats than the Tories, as long as non-Tory seats add up to 50 percent. A minority government, known as a "hung parliament" in Britain, is a likely possibility.
Beneath the political novelty, this is virtually a single-issue election -- the economy.
To hear their slogans, it's as if the parties have returned to traditional left and right positions. Brown defended spending on large public institutions and continued stimulus: "Britain is on the road to recovery," he said, "and nothing we do should put that recovery at risk."
Cameron, backing away from his earlier eco-friendly, pro-gay message to return to traditional Conservative austerity, pledged a smaller government and immediate spending cuts: "Let's get off this road to ruin, and instead get on the path to prosperity and progress."
At root is the need to cut spending and debt from the British economy -- the deficit now amounts to 11 percent of GDP and public debt is equal to 60 percent of the economy -- a looming challenge that none of the candidates seems fully willing to present to the voters.
Cameron has backed away from earlier, masochistic promises of an "age of austerity," but is promising to slash hard and immediately, although he is also offering up a cut in payroll taxes and a "bonus" paid to married couples.
Brown says he will continue government spending to stimulate the economy until 2011, after which he will institute cuts that will halve the deficit within four years.
Beyond this, though, the major parties really aren't that far apart. The difference in government spending levels among their platforms is, according to one analysis, only $30 billion), a relatively negligible sum.
Coming up the middle is another young candidate, Nick Clegg, leader of the centrist Liberal Democrat Party and a likely kingmaker in any minority government. Drawing support from disillusioned voters for both major parties, he studiously tried to avoid pledging himself to either.
Most interesting to watch in the coming weeks will be image management. While it has become traditional for the Tories to appear more left wing and Labor to look more conservative in campaigns, to attract one another's supporters this election offers new challenges for the parties.
(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.scrippsnews.com.)
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I feel that David Cameron
I feel that David Cameron must have been the man who will change the virtues of the Great Britain in the international platforms ,the man who had created history broke the draught of 70 years as first PM form the coalition government must be adhere to what he perceive to be assertive diplomacy and being the tag of the youngest PM in the history of Britain will certainly calls for the youth revolution in empowerment of the young guns of Britain. Indeed he had pre established dozen of plans for the international concerns including top rated Terrorism and Global warming, as it is latest updated in dozen media i came across his manifesto for Green and Clean world, which sounds incredible.
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