British Prime Minister Gordon Brown suffered another serious blow to his leadership yesterday after his governing Labour Party lost one of its safest seats in a by-election in his native Scotland.
The Scottish National Party (SNP) reversed a majority of 13,500 in Glasgow East to snatch Labour’s 25th-safest seat in Britain, prompting more questions about how long Brown can remain in Downing Street.
Although he has only been in the job for a year, Brown has already suffered a string of terrible results in by-elections, local elections and London’s mayoral election, when Labour incumbent Ken Livingstone was beaten by Boris Johnson of the Conservatives. The latest hammer blow prompted Conservative leader David Cameron to call for a snap general election.
PHOTO: AP
“It’s obviously a truly dreadful result for Labour and Gordon Brown,” Cameron told reporters.
“What I wonder is whether we can really put up with this for another 18 months ... I think the prime minister should have his holiday but then we should have an election,” he said.
Brown, who is due to start his summer holiday next week, constitutionally has until the first half of 2010 to call a general election.
He has been under increasing pressure amid economic problems and widespread criticism, including from Labour lawmakers, of his leadership style and presentation skills.
But the loss of Glasgow East in Labour’s traditional central Scotland heartland is being seen as one of the biggest political upsets of recent times.
Questions are now being asked about how long Brown can stay in the job, even though there seems to be no obvious contender waiting in the wings.
Sky News television political editor Adam Boulton wrote in his Internet blog that there was unlikely to be “any sudden panic” which would lead to a leadership challenge.
But he added: “This will plunge Labour activists into even greater doom. Over the next few months, many will be wondering whether changes at the top could at least limit the damage when the general election comes.”
The victorious SNP candidate in Glasgow East, John Mason, won 11,277 votes, a majority of 365 over Labour’s Margaret Curran, who suffered a drop of 19 percent in vote share on the last general election in 2005.
“This SNP victory is not just a political earthquake, it is off the Richter scale,” Mason said in his acceptance speech. “It is an epic win, and the tremors are being felt all the way to Downing Street.”
Turnout in the by-election, sparked by the resignation of Labour’s David Marshall on health grounds, was around 42 percent, higher than expected, prompting commentators to suggest traditional Labour voters had switched to the pro-Scottish independence SNP to punish Labour.
Brown, who was born and raised in Glasgow, would lose his own seat in Scotland were the 22.54 percent swing replicated in a general election, Britain’s Press Association (PA) news agency said.
In that scenario, Labour would be left with just one member of parliament in Scotland compared to 40 after the 2005 election, PA calculations show, meaning ministers including Chancellor of the Exchequer Alistair Darling would lose their seats.
Douglas Alexander, international development secretary and a key ally of Brown, said voters had been expressing frustration at global economic conditions, adding the prime minister should not shoulder all the blame.
KINGPIN: Marset allegedly laundered the proceeds of his drug enterprise by purchasing and sponsoring professional soccer teams and even put himself in the starting lineups Notorious Latin American narco trafficker Sebastian Marset, who eluded police for years, was handed over to US authorities after his arrest on Friday in Bolivia. Marset, a Uruguayan national who was on the US most-wanted list, was passed to agents of the US Drug Enforcement Administration at Santa Cruz airport in Bolivia, then put on a US airplane, Bolivian state television showed. “The arrest and deportation were carried out pursuant to a court order issued by the US justice system,” Bolivian Minister of Government Marco Antonio Oviedo told reporters. The alleged kingpin was arrested in an upscale neighborhood of Santa
ACTIONABLE ADVICE: The majority of chatbots tested provided guidance on weapons, tactics and target selections, with Perplexity and Meta AI deemed to be the least safe From school shootings to synagogue bombings, leading artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots helped researchers plot violent attacks, according to a study published on Wednesday that highlighted the technology’s potential for real-world harm. Researchers from the nonprofit watchdog Center for Countering Digital Hate and CNN posed as 13-year-old boys in the US and Ireland to test 10 chatbots, including ChatGPT, Google Gemini, Perplexity, Deepseek and Meta AI. Eight of the chatbots assisted the make-believe attackers in more than half the responses, providing advice on “locations to target” and “weapons to use” in an attack, the study said. The chatbots had become a “powerful accelerant for
SCANDAL: Other images discovered earlier show Andrew bent over a female and lying across the laps of a number of women, while Mandelson is pictured in his underpants A photograph of former British prince Andrew and veteran politician Peter Mandelson sitting in bathrobes alongside late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein was unearthed on Friday in previously published documents. The image is believed to be the first known photograph of the two men with Epstein. They are currently engulfed in scandal in the UK over their ties to their mutual friend. The undated photograph, first reported by ITV News, shows King Charles III’s disgraced brother and former British ambassador to the US sitting barefoot outside on a wooden deck. They appear to have mugs with a US flag on them
Since the war in the Middle East began nearly two weeks ago, the telephone at Ron Hubbard’s bomb shelter company in Texas has not stopped ringing. Foreign and US clients are rushing to buy his bunkers, seeking refuge in case of air raids, nuclear fallout or apocalypse. With the US and Israel pounding Iran, and Tehran retaliating with strikes across the region, Hubbard has seen demand for his product soar, mostly from Gulf nation customers in Bahrain, Qatar, Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates. “You can imagine how many people are thinking: ‘I wish I had a bomb shelter,’” Hubbard, 63, said in
RSS