British Prime Minister Gordon Brown told GMTV television yesterday that he would “take full responsibility” if his party is humbled in Thursday’s vote — a hint that he might step down as party leader if he loses power.
With most polls indicating no party will win an outright majority, senior Labour figures are attempting to woo the Liberal Democrats in an attempt to cling to power.
With just 48 hours until polling day, they suggested that Labour supporters should back centrist Liberal Democrat candidates in areas where the Lib Dems are in a close battle with the Conservatives.
“I always want the Labour candidate to win. But I recognize there’s an issue in places like... where my family lives, where a [Liberal Democrat] candidate is fighting the Tories, who are in second place. And I want to keep the Tories out,” Ed Balls, one of British Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s closest lieutenants, said to the New Statesman magazine.
In seats where the Conservatives and Labour were fighting close-run battles, Balls said Lib Dem supporters should “bite their lip” and vote Labour.
Another Cabinet minister, Welsh Secretary Peter Hain, dropped a similar hint when he told the Independent newspaper that people should “vote with their heads, not their hearts.”
The call came as Brown, Conservative leader David Cameron, and leader of the centrist Liberal Democrats Nick Clegg geared up for a penultimate day of campaigning in the closest election for decades.
Labour, fighting to be re-elected to an historic fourth term after 13 years in office, trails several points behind the Conservatives. The latest polls showed Brown’s party in second place, just ahead of the Lib Dems.
The call for tactical voting came as the Financial Times announced it was supporting the Conservatives for the first time since 1987.
The influential daily paper said Labour needed “a spell in opposition to rejuvenate itself.”
Cameron’s party was “not a perfect fit, but their instincts are sound. They would create the best environment for enterprise and wealth creation,” an editorial said.
The paper expressed some misgivings, voicing concern about the party’s “reflexive hostility to Europe” and the inexperience of the Cameron team, but concluded that “Britain needs a stable and legitimate government to navigate its fiscal crisis and punch its weight abroad … On balance, the Conservative party best fits the bill.”
Cameron’s Conservatives received another boost when an Ipsos MORI survey for Thomson Reuters on Monday indicated that the party was performing strongly enough in key marginal constituencies to secure a slim overall majority, albeit of just two seats.
But the latest polls yesterday showed the election producing a hung parliament.
A ComRes poll for ITV television news and the Independent put the Conservatives on 37 percent, Labour on 29 percent and the Lib Dems on 26 percent.
AFGHAN CHILD: A court battle is ongoing over if the toddler can stay with Joshua Mast and his wife, who wanted ‘life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness’ for her Major Joshua Mast, a US Marine whose adoption of an Afghan war orphan has spurred a years-long legal battle, is to remain on active duty after a three-member panel of Marines on Tuesday found that while he acted in a way unbecoming of an officer to bring home the baby girl, it did not warrant his separation from the military. Lawyers for the Marine Corps argued that Mast abused his position, disregarded orders of his superiors, mishandled classified information and improperly used a government computer in his fight over the child who was found orphaned on the battlefield in rural Afghanistan
STICKING TO DEFENSE: Despite the screening of videos in which they appeared, one of the defendants said they had no memory of the event A court trying a Frenchman charged with drugging his wife and enlisting dozens of strangers to rape her screened videos of the abuse to the public on Friday, to challenge several codefendants who denied knowing she was unconscious during their actions. The judge in the southern city of Avignon had nine videos and several photographs of the abuse of Gisele Pelicot shown in the courtroom and an adjoining public chamber, involving seven of the 50 men accused alongside her husband. Present in the courtroom herself, Gisele Pelicot looked at her telephone during the hour and a half of screenings, while her ex-husband
NEW STORM: investigators dubbed the attacks on US telecoms ‘Salt Typhoon,’ after authorities earlier this year disrupted China’s ‘Flax Typhoon’ hacking group Chinese hackers accessed the networks of US broadband providers and obtained information from systems that the federal government uses for court-authorized wiretapping, the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported on Saturday. The networks of Verizon Communications, AT&T and Lumen Technologies, along with other telecoms, were breached by the recently discovered intrusion, the newspaper said, citing people familiar with the matter. The hackers might have held access for months to network infrastructure used by the companies to cooperate with court-authorized US requests for communications data, the report said. The hackers had also accessed other tranches of Internet traffic, it said. The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs
EYEING THE US ELECTION: Analysts say that Pyongyang would likely leverage its enlarged nuclear arsenal for concessions after a new US administration is inaugurated North Korean leader Kim Jong-un warned again that he could use nuclear weapons in potential conflicts with South Korea and the US, as he accused them of provoking North Korea and raising animosities on the Korean Peninsula, state media reported yesterday. Kim has issued threats to use nuclear weapons pre-emptively numerous times, but his latest warning came as experts said that North Korea could ramp up hostilities ahead of next month’s US presidential election. In a Monday speech at a university named after him, the Kim Jong-un National Defense University, he said that North Korea “will without hesitation use all its attack
RSS