Wellyopolis

May 06, 2005

Quick thoughts on the British election

I managed to avoid the time-suck that would have been following the campaign, and went to the theater last night so didn't even follow the results streaming in.


  • Get used to saying "Prime Minister Gordon Brown" -- it'll be happening soon enough
  • A smaller but still very workable majority will be good for the Labour government. There's nothing so bad for a government as complacency that the major opposition party is an embarrassment to itself.
  • Long-term predictions are a fool's errand but I'll make one: Labour will win again in 2009/10.
  • Good on the Liberal Democrats for their best showing in 76 years.
  • It won't be long before Helen Clark is claiming that this bodes well for her own upcoming election. Sound like BS to you? It is, but I don't think any Labour leaders believe the trans-national Labourism they spout whenever a Labour party wins.

Posted by robe0419 at May 6, 2005 08:06 AM | TrackBack
Comments

Yep, we saw Gordon giving his acceptance speech: that was a man gearing up for the top job, no question. I tend to agree with you about 2009. Blair will be gone, the Iraq war will be a memory. Unless there's some kind of economic crash between now and then...

I'm ambivalent about the Lib Dem result; if they hadn't lost several seats that they should have kept, it would have been a considerably better result. They should have done better than they did, really. (They won 17 new seats in all, I think. One in my constituency. Which I'm also ambivalent about, seeing as they took it from Plaid.) But, as everyone's agreeing, it was in the end a really strange election - it ended up with an overall result that matched predictions, but you should have seen some of the strange routes it took to get there... (Blaenau Gwent, WTF?!)

Posted by: sharon at May 6, 2005 09:19 AM
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