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The Trouble with Mr. Bean

British Voters Set to Punish Hapless Gordon Brown

By Thomas Hüetlin in London

UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown has seen his initial popularity sink amid a series of gaffes. Now UK voters are set to punish the Mr. Bean of British politics in local elections -- and the knives are also being sharpened within Brown's Labour Party.

At first glance, the British parliament, with its green leather and dark wood, has the look of an exclusive club. But appearances are deceptive. The place is often more like a boxing ring, except that verbal blows are the ones that count.

Opposition leader David Cameron, a skilled debater from his days at the elite educational institutions Eton and Oxford, is an especially merciless fighter. It often seems almost sadistic when he derides Prime Minister Gordon Brown, a man with more modest verbal skills. Last Wednesday, Cameron adopted an even sharper tone when he launched a frontal attack on the prime minister, to the delight and applause of his party: "Isn't it the case that the Labour Party have finally worked out that they have a loser, not a leader?"

The remark was right on target. In a single sentence, Cameron had managed to expose the prime minister's dilemma to public ridicule. For the first time since he took office 10 months ago, Brown had come under fire from his own party, which forced him to make an embarrassing about-face in a matter considered central to his policy agenda: taxes and the fight against poverty.

By raising the entry-level tax rate for people on low incomes from 10 to 20 percent, the prime minister had unleashed a rebellion precisely among those members of parliament who had hoped that Brown, after years of neo-liberal softening under former Prime Minister Tony Blair, would finally strengthen the party's social conscience once again.

"We have never had a measure where we are being asked to vote for a package that makes 5 million of the poorest people worse off, who are doing exactly what the government has asked people to do, that is work," said Frank Field, a former minister of welfare reform who is the leader of the party's rebels.

With his forced U-turn -- he promised compensation payments for those adversely affected by the tax reform -- Brown likely avoided a defeat of the measure in parliament, but his authority has been diminished even further.

"The entire dispute over the tax increase for the poor is perceived as a weakness on the part of Brown, and as stupidity," says Tony Travers, a professor at the London School of Economics. After almost three terms of Labour governments, the party's attractiveness has largely dissipated for many voters. Another problem for Labour is that dependable voters like teachers are pressuring the government for the first time in 21 years by going on strike. Nurses, civil servants and postal workers are also threatening to stage a "summer of discontent," a reference to the nationwide wave of strikes in the winter of 1978-1979 that helped bring Margaret Thatcher into power.

Brown's party is predicted to emerge from Thursday's local elections with the worst election result in more than 30 years. Experts estimate that only about 25 percent of registered voters plan to vote for Labour. It would be a massive punishment for the governing party, which still managed to capture more than 35 percent of the vote nationwide in the 2005 parliamentary election.

Labour Party officials are now gearing up for defeat. "Many voters will take this opportunity to slap the government in the face," says Chris Leslie, who, only a year ago, was part of the committee that prepared Brown's assumption of office. Foreign Secretary David Miliband, the Labour Party's young star and already mentioned by many as Brown's possible successor, also seems to have given up. The party, says Miliband, is a "political underdog" today.

Labour's rapid nose-dive is blamed almost entirely on the prime minister, the man who, after a short honeymoon, experienced a plunge in popularity equaled only by that of Neville Chamberlain, who went down in history as the hapless and weak prime minister who appeased Adolf Hitler.

"Gordon Brown was put on earth to remind people how good Tony Blair was," said Lord Desai, a Labour member of the House of Lords. The prime minister, Desai said, is "weak" and "indecisive," and "more like porridge and haggis" to Blair's "champagne and caviar."