Prime Minister Tony Blair suffered a fresh electoral setback yesterday, when his governing Labour Party lost one parliamentary seat to an anti-war party and narrowly avoided defeat in another constituency.
The Liberal Democrats, who strongly opposed the war in Iraq, came first with 10,274 votes in Leicester, a city in central England with a large Muslim population.
Labour came second with 8,620 votes and the Conservative Party was third with 5,796.
The result is a further blow for Blair, whose popularity has slumped since the Iraq war.
Labour fared terribly in local council and European Parliament elections last month, and some in the party question whether Blair, once their most prized electoral asset, has become a liability.
Labour narrowly held onto another parliamentary seat, in Birmingham, with 7,451 votes. The Liberal Democrats came second on 6,991 votes and the Conservatives came third with 3,543.
Government ministers tried to put a brave face on the result.
"What's astonishing is that seven years into a government, Labour has won one election and come a close second in another, " said Trade and Industry Secretary Patricia Hewitt.
Hewitt insisted Blair's leadership "is absolutely secure.
"I am in no doubt that he will lead us into the election and will be winning an historic third term," she said.
The two by-elections, triggered by the death of one Labour lawmaker and the resignation of another, followed the publication on Wednesday of a report exposing widespread British intelligence failures on Iraqi weapons of mass destruction.
The inquiry, led by Lord Butler, concluded that British intelligence was flawed, but said the government had not deliberately deceived anyone as it built a case for toppling former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein.
It was the fourth such inquiry to clear the government of hyping the Iraqi threat. Blair claimed vindication, insisting he acted in good faith.
Political opponents, however, say Blair's confident assertions before the war that Iraq had stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction were misleading, when intelligence was patchy at best.
The new Liberal Democrat lawmaker for the Leicester South constituency, Parmjit Singh Gill, who overturned a large Labour majority of 13,243 votes, said the electorate had given their verdict on the war.
"The claims about weapons of mass destruction were exaggerated," he said, in his victory speech.
"The justification which Tony Blair gave for backing [US President] George W. Bush was wrong. Their message is that the prime minister has abused and lost their trust," Gill said.
Blair's Health Minister, John Reid, conceded that some voters were unhappy about the war.
"I have not denied there is an element of protest in the results, nor have I denied that we have got to listen to what has been said. All I have said is that it is not entirely about Iraq," he told the British Broadcasting Corp.
The Liberal Democrats fought both seats on a strong anti-war ticket, reaching out to large Muslim populations. Leicester South has 20,000 Muslims, representing 18 percent of the population. The city is expected within a decade to be the first British city with a nonwhite majority. Birmingham's Hodge Hill constituency has some 8,500 Muslims, or 14 percent of the population.
‘UNUSUAL EVENT’: The Australian defense minister said that the Chinese navy task group was entitled to be where it was, but Australia would be watching it closely The Australian and New Zealand militaries were monitoring three Chinese warships moving unusually far south along Australia’s east coast on an unknown mission, officials said yesterday. The Australian government a week ago said that the warships had traveled through Southeast Asia and the Coral Sea, and were approaching northeast Australia. Australian Minister for Defence Richard Marles yesterday said that the Chinese ships — the Hengyang naval frigate, the Zunyi cruiser and the Weishanhu replenishment vessel — were “off the east coast of Australia.” Defense officials did not respond to a request for comment on a Financial Times report that the task group from
Asian perspectives of the US have shifted from a country once perceived as a force of “moral legitimacy” to something akin to “a landlord seeking rent,” Singaporean Minister for Defence Ng Eng Hen (黃永宏) said on the sidelines of an international security meeting. Ng said in a round-table discussion at the Munich Security Conference in Germany that assumptions undertaken in the years after the end of World War II have fundamentally changed. One example is that from the time of former US president John F. Kennedy’s inaugural address more than 60 years ago, the image of the US was of a country
DEFENSE UPHEAVAL: Trump was also to remove the first woman to lead a military service, as well as the judge advocates general for the army, navy and air force US President Donald Trump on Friday fired the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Air Force General C.Q. Brown, and pushed out five other admirals and generals in an unprecedented shake-up of US military leadership. Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social that he would nominate former lieutenant general Dan “Razin” Caine to succeed Brown, breaking with tradition by pulling someone out of retirement for the first time to become the top military officer. The president would also replace the head of the US Navy, a position held by Admiral Lisa Franchetti, the first woman to lead a military service,
BLIND COST CUTTING: A DOGE push to lay off 2,000 energy department workers resulted in hundreds of staff at a nuclear security agency being fired — then ‘unfired’ US President Donald Trump’s administration has halted the firings of hundreds of federal employees who were tasked with working on the nation’s nuclear weapons programs, in an about-face that has left workers confused and experts cautioning that the Department of Government Efficiency’s (DOGE’s) blind cost cutting would put communities at risk. Three US officials who spoke to The Associated Press said up to 350 employees at the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) were abruptly laid off late on Thursday, with some losing access to e-mail before they’d learned they were fired, only to try to enter their offices on Friday morning
RSS