Blair Likely To Survive Brit Vote

Voters battered Prime Minister Tony Blair throughout Britain's election campaign with questions about Iraq, but as it ended Wednesday there was scant evidence that opposition parties had laid a glove on him.

Britons choose 646 members of the next House of Commons on Thursday. Polls suggest Blair will win a third term, defeating Conservative leader Michael Howard — who also supported the Iraq war and whose attacks on Blair's integrity and calls for a crackdown on immigration appear to have failed to win over the public.

"This is the gritted teeth election," Professor Steve Reicher at St. Andrews University observed. "People are thinking, what choice do I have? They think, 'I don't like what Blair has done, but I don't like Howard.'"

But even if Blair wins, a sharp reduction of his Labour's party's House of Commons majority — currently 161 more than the combined opposition parties — would be seen as a personal repudiation and could hasten his departure in office. Such a result could also make future leaders more reluctant to back Washington militarily against the public's will.

Blair has insisted he be judged instead by Britain's strong economy — but in one campaign stop after another he faced sharp, even rude, questions from voters about his decision to join the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq.

Still, the louder Howard called Blair a liar about the reasons for going to war, the further the Tories faded in opinion surveys.

The Populus poll in The Times on Wednesday showed Labour supported by 41 percent of the sample, the Conservatives by 27 percent. The telephone poll of 1,420 people had a three percent margin of error.

"The Conservatives are now worse placed than before their record low results in 1997 and 2001," wrote Peter Riddell, The Times' poll analyst.

The Conservatives also sought to win votes by promising better health services and to be tough on crime and immigration. Blair's Labour Party pointed to its economic legacy — presiding over the nation's longest postwar economic expansion and keeping inflation and unemployment low.

Britain's place in the European Union and the debate over joining the single currency — big issues in the 1997 and 2001 campaigns — were scarcely mentioned.

The prime minister said this would be his last campaign, and that he would stand down sometime before the next election. His most likely successor, Treasury chief Gordon Brown, was often at Blair's side during the campaign as the two men worked hard to bury their reported differences.
Blair's biggest fear was that disgruntled Labour supporters would either stay home on Thursday, or cast a protest vote for the Liberal Democrats, the only major party to oppose the Iraq war.

"If people make a protest vote, then what happens is not that the issue they are protesting about is the issue that changes," Blair told an end of campaign news conference. Tellingly, he held it at London's Finchley constituency, once Margaret Thatcher's seat but held by a Labour lawmaker since 1997.

"If we end up with a Conservative government, it's the very things people value that's put at risk," Blair said.

Some 44.2 million Britons were eligible to vote between 0600 GMT and 2100 GMT Thursday.

Howard pressed on with the "liar" attack on Wednesday.

"We want to be talking about our plans for the future but Mr. Blair and his party simply spend their time not telling the truth about our policies," Howard said.

The choices between the two main parties were not always sharply drawn.

Howard attacked Blair's case for going to war in Iraq, which was based on weapons of mass destruction that proved not to exist. But Howard said he too, would have joined the U.S. campaign, and didn't propose to do anything different in Iraq now. Neither side is talking about pulling Britain's 8,400 military personnel from Iraq – and this seems unlikely to change as a result of the vote.

Labour said Conservative pledges to reduce taxes would force spending cuts on social services, but the Conservatives promised to match Labour outlays on schools and hospitals.

Labour held the lead in opinion polls throughout the campaign, and the gap widened as Iraq became the major issue last week.

"Whatever I say, I will never, ever convince some people who have been opposed to this war," said Blair. "I cannot apologize for that decision because I still think the world is a better place with Saddam in prison rather than in power."