Blair Preparing For Crunch 48 Hours

The BBC ^ | January 27, 2004

[RWR8189]

The prime minister still does not know if he will win Tuesday's vote

Tony Blair is entering the toughest 48 hours of his premiership as MPs prepare to vote on university top-up fees and publication of the Hutton report nears.

The prime minister spoke to Labour MPs on Monday and, it was claimed, won over some waverers for the fees vote.

However, further concessions have been ruled out and Downing Street said the numbers were still "too close to call".

Hours beforehand ministers get their copies of the Hutton report into the death of scientist Dr David Kelly.

Other interested parties - including BBC executives and Dr Kelly's family - will also receive the report from around 1230 GMT, although it will be another 24 hours before the contents are made public.

By then the result of the government's most crucial vote since coming to power in 1997 will be known.

Result unpredictable

The efforts to secure a Labour majority will continue to the last minute, with Mr Blair following up around one-and-a-half hours of talks with potential rebels in his Commons office on Monday with further talks on Tuesday.

The result is still unpredictable, despite the government's 161 Commons majority.

CRUNCH 48 HOURS Hutton report preview copies released to interested parties 1230 GMT Tuesday Top-up fees debate gets underway around 1240 GMT MPs vote at 1900 GMT The government has a majority of 161 If all opposition MPs vote against, it needs 81 Labour MPs to rebel for plans to fall 155 Labour MPs signed a motion opposing the Bill Tony Blair says his authority is on the line with the vote Hutton report published 1330 GMT Wednesday Key parties get Hutton preview Analysis: Testing the mood

Both the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats plan to oppose the Higher Education Bill, which would allow universities to charge students £3,000-a-year, payable when they earn £15,000.

However, following Mr Blair's campaign of persuasion, Education Secretary Charles Clarke said he was "confident" about the vote.

"The prime minister always has an effect when he speaks to people," he said.

"He is one of the most articulate arguers there is.

"I have spoken to people, my colleagues have been speaking to people.

"And today people have been moving from that undecided category to say they will support us - whether enough we shall see, but I am confident."

Rise pledge

On Monday evening, Mr Clarke spelt out details of plans for an independent review to examine the impact of top-up fees three years after their introduction.

Over the weekend, he pledged to give legal force to his pledge to prevent fees rising above £3,000 per year until after at least two general elections.

What are the concessions? Fees review planned

Both measures are aimed at winning over wavering MPs, but many potential rebels say they are still unconvinced.

Labour MP Alan Simpson told BBC News the plans would not address universities' £10bn funding shortfall. He urged ministers to withdraw the bill.

"It will save the Labour Party nationally and in Parliament the pain of huge political embarrassment and huge division," he said.

Several MPs say they are agonising over their decision.

Labour MP Angela Eagle said: "You have to think about the policy but also the political effects of what you are doing and that is all mixed up with loyalty."

In a sign of the vote's fine balance, nine MPs on a Commons committee have cut short a trip to Africa to return in time.

[lentulusgracchus]

Wonder if Blair will have some Conservatives pitch in, if the vote gets too close?

If he lost a vote like that, his government would fall, and then we'd be in it pretty deep in Iraq, and the Democrats would start foaming at the mouth for real.

[lentulusgracchus]

Not that Americans have anything to say about British politics.......just as they haven't anything to say about ours........but God help us if Tony Blair falls.

[bernie_g]

I very much doubt Mr Blair will fall in the next 48hrs, any more than Mrs Thatcher fell immediately after the poll-tax riots. She fell after an almost inconceivable by-election defeat in Eastbourne (an incredibly safe seat) convinced her colleagues she was now an electoral liability. If Blair goes soon, it will almost certainly be in a similar way

It's not as easy for Labour to change their leader though, their process for doing this has many more stages, not all of them conspicuously democratic. It's much more likely that he'll resign and hand over to Gordon Brown rather than risk further damage to his party and introducing a risk of somone from the left of the party being selected instead.

If it does happen, the most likely cause isn't Hutton, but a combination of policies that are deeply unpopular with the socialists in his own party and in his electoral base, and a wider issue of trust due to the absence of Iraqi WMD.

Blair bet his reputation on taking the country to war, against a mixture of indifference and hostility, by telling everybody that his intelligence services were saying that Saddam definitely had WMD and that they were likely to be used against the UK or at least, against British interests. What's really hurting him are statements like those of David Kay and Colin Powell recently, combined with the Hutton evidence showing that Blairs PR team had improper levels of influence over intelligence summaries (which has made a lot of intelligence veterans, such as the previous chief of the JIC quite properly furious and eager to say so in public) I gather WMD isn't a big issue in the US, but it was the basis of Blair's whole case for going to war here.

He's still refusing to admit that there weren't any, but in the face of mounting certainty in the media and the country as a whole that he was wrong, it deeply undermines him here.

If that is reflected in election results, such as the forthcoming Euro elections, then he will certainly fall.

[lentulusgracchus]

I gather WMD isn't a big issue in the US, but it was the basis of Blair's whole case for going to war here.

I wouldn't agree. I'd say that WMD was about 75% of the argument here, too (the balance being ties to Al-Q'aeda through Ansar al-Islam), but people are more understanding and less ready to find fault with the intelligence community, whose best access was cut off in 1998 when Saddam tossed the U.N. inspectors. Part of the Iraqi complaint against the inspection regime was that the inspection teams had embedded intelligence officers from Western countries. Which may have been so, but Iraq hadn't the right to complain, and tossing them eventually cut Saddam's own throat. If we're cut off from solid information, and if some of the last hard information we had coming out of Iraq was the inspectors' agile interception of calutrons that the Iraqis had absolutely no business possessing, much less concealing from the inspectors, then what were we to think?

You might search FR for an interesting thread on the recent American articles on the deterioration of Western knowledge about WMD programs and their status in Iraq after 1998. If Mr. Blair can make this case to the British public, they may not be any more forgiving, but at least they'll be more informed than European opinion seems generally to want to be about these issues. None of the foregoing, by the way, is intended to deal with the possibility that we've been foxed by Saddam, and that his weapons are safely hidden after all -- somewhere -- and that Dr. Germ's saturninity in the face of Saddam's terminal captivity and the Cubs' proven demise reflects guilty knowledge that she is at pains not to impart to Western intelligence.

In other words, I still smell a rat, and I can understand readily why Mr. Blair would persist in smelling one, too.

[lentulusgracchus]

If that is reflected in election results, such as the forthcoming Euro elections, then he will certainly fall.

When are those elections? I take it that seats in the European parliament are at stake.

[dr_who_2]

Hi, I'm Tony Blair. HELP!!!!!

[bernie_g]

July. They are seats in the European Parliament, elected by a proportional representation system. So the Greens and other minor parties do well, and they can take votes off Labor very easily. What would be even worse would be a bad by-election in a safe seat, due to an MP dying, retiring or being thrown in jail (this last happens regrettably often.)

What was also interesting about Blair's survival, was that he won the vote due to a close ally of Gordon Brown changing sides. This is being seen here as a statement of Brown's power (already considerable). From a US point of view, Brown is probably the best option. He's unlikely to pull UK troops out. If one of the left won in an open vote, say Robin Cook or even a wildcard like Glenda Jackson or Ken Livingstone, either of whom might want to just pull out until there was a UN mandate, the US would presumably have a problem with that outcome.

Would the consensus here be for intervening in UK affairs given that kind of eventuality? Bear in mind that the Conservatives are going for Blair's jugular over lack of WMD and so are many within his own party and the country.

[lentulusgracchus]

I think no U.S. government or official would want so much as to approach a comment on the UK parliamentary political situation with a ten-foot pole. (Conservatives here still remember with umbrage FDR's improper conversations with Britain's First Sea Lord behind Neville Chamberlain's back, and the unjust jailing of three people over their knowledge of those back-channel communications.)

I'm surprised you mentioned Glenda Jackson's name: I remember her standing for Parliament and being elected as a back-bencher a few years ago, but I hadn't realized she now aspires to the mantle of Tony Benn.

If things got really iffy, and judging by the outcome you reported, they're iffy now, American conservatives could hope, quietly, that British conservatives would reconsider giving Blair the knife, considering the global significance of the policies that are riding on his continuing, as you pointed out, to meet the challenge from the Left.

After all, the policy Mr. Blair is pursuing now in the Middle East, where he has built a very considerable British presence exceeding anything Britain had in the area before the retreat from "east of Aden", is very reminiscent of her, and many other PMs', dry-eyed view of foreign affairs.