Calling the Election At Once Would Help Contain Political Bitterness

The concentration on political polls and their within margin of error shifts is a symptom of the need for the real poll.  For a general election.  Parliament expires on 10 May, the time left for something to turn up for Brown is now so constricted that the most likely thing to turn up is another Brown-engineered disaster.

The ghastly figures in the budget the Treasury must be preparing, the terrible chances of a disaster in Afghanistan,  a courteous flaying by Chilcot et al.,  an outbreak of further revelations on the inappropriate behaviour of members of the Labour party and their MPs  and Labour members of the Upper House,  another outburst of nose-picking or its equivalent on national television, yet another international snub for a finished politician.  The potential is enormous.  And, what makes it worse,  there is nothing  that Brown could do that will make anyone change their mind about him or his bully-boys.

Interestingly, the last time a new to office Conservative Leader was looking at a disgraced Labour incumbent it took a formal vote of no confidence in the House (the second, tabled within weeks of one another) to force him out.  Callaghan's was not the personal disgrace that is Brown's, but he enjoyed the ownership of an equivalently shambolic economic and social achievement, different in form but not in cause.  Gross overspending then, and answering to union puppet masters, yielded inflation on a scale that is on its way to us now, as well as Labour-supporter and union behaviour that brought  a sea change in voter attitudes to the role of the state in the economy and society.

Now Brown has the party-putsch taken majority of Blair's 2005 election win, unlike Callaghan surviving only with the contemptible support of the Liberal Democrats, so there is no possibility of the execution of this vile regime in the House itself.   We will have to wait to the bitter end, as Callaghan had hoped to make the electorate wait then, but was ambushed by Margaret Thatcher.  Then, the one-nation conservatism present in the Party was boosted by the cutting short of Labour's misgovernance, there was a sense that  the national disaster of  Callaghan's Labour had created a need for governing from a consensual rather than conflictual stance, that this  was required; Conservatism in tooth and claw, conviction Conservatism, was restrained.

This time the situation is reversed by Brown's intransigence, by his avoidance of an electoral confrontation he fears.  Despite the leadership of the Conservatives properly seeking consensus and governance for the best national interest, the interest of us all, the infuriated conflictual and conviction Conservatives could well overwhelm the leadership, driven by Brown's exhaustion of everyone's patience and his refusal to recognise the wrong he has done us all.

Many voters want more than the defeat of this Labour regime at the polls; when we finally get there they want the Labour party, in its present anti-democratic form, crushed.  In failing to replace Brown as Leader, and in failing to force Brown to obtain an electoral mandate, in allowing him to continue to, and threaten beyond, the bitter end, Labour has erected a politics of confrontation and command that  will be equally bitterly regretted if the current Conservative leadership is overwhelmed from the right.