Gwynne Dyer, Contributor
AS SHARKS respond to blood in the water, so do journalists to panic among politicians -- and there is the scent of panic in the air as the British election campaign enters the home stretch. It's still hard to see how the Conservative opposition could win on May 5, but there is suddenly a chance that the governing Labour Party could lose its majority in parliament over voter resentment at how Prime Minister Tony Blair dragged the country into war.
Blair almost got away with it. For most of the campaign, he avoided any serious debate on his decision to commit Britain to the invasion of Iraq, alongside his friend George W. Bush, and on every other issue he was fireproof.
The British economy is among Europe's healthiest, unemploy-ment is less than half that of France or Germany, and Blair's government has been pouring money into health and education. Huge numbers of Labour voters felt deceived and betrayed by his Iraq policy, but so long as the war did not become a central issue, Labour would cruise safely back into a third term in office.
ANGER FLARES
Then, on April 24, came the first in a series of well-timed leaks about how Blair tricked his cabinet, his party and the country into believing that the war was legal.
The anger that many Labour voters felt about Blair's deceptions flared up again, and suddenly, the election was a horse race.
Disaffected Labour voters would never give their votes to the Conservatives, whose leader, Michael Howard, had eagerly supported the war but they might well give them to the third-place Liberal Democrats, the only party that openly opposed the invasion of Iraq. That could turn significant numbers of marginal Labour seats into Lib Dem or even Conservative ones, depending on which opposition party was currently in second place locally. Panic: suddenly Blair was all over the media warning that "It's Labour versus Tory (Conservative). Anything else is a Tory vote by the black door."
The British papers are full of cut-out guides to how a tactical vote for the Lib Dems would affect the outcome in each individual constituency, together with the crucial information that almost no amount of anti-Blair tactical voting by Labour supporters could give the Conservatives a majority.
What tactical voting could do, on around a ten per cent swing from Labour to the Liberal Democrats, is to deprive Labour of its majority in parliament. Labour would still be the biggest party, and would be almost certain to form the next government, but it would have to be either a minority government with outside support from a (much bigger) Liberal Democratic contingent in parliament, or even a formal coalition with the Lib Dems.
TACTICAL VOTES
The only thing that can shift the political landscape in Britain is Labour voters casting tactical votes for Liberal Democratic candidates, and while there will be enough of them to deliver a stinging rebuke to Blair for the war, they will probably not be numerous enough to deprive Labour of its majority.
Gwynne Dyer is a London-based independent journalist whose articles are published in 45 countries.
