BRITAIN: Pundits are predicting large-scale Labour losses in today's English local elections, sufficient to trigger serious questions about the duration of prime minister Tony Blair's remaining time in 10 Downing Street. Frank Millar, London Editor, reports
Labour nervousness was not eased last night as Mr Blair's promise of tough new rules to deport automatically foreigners convicted of an imprisonable offence appeared to be unravelling in the face of suggestions that this would breach EU guidelines and his government's own human rights legislation.
However - with the near-certainty that the overnight results will tell little about the outcome of the next general election - David Cameron and Sir Menzies Campbell also face a nervous 24 hours as they await the voters' interim verdict on their new leaderships of the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats.
Mr Cameron and his front-bench spokesman, David Davis, failed to draw fresh blood from a wounded home secretary Charles Clarke in the Commons yesterday as the foreign prisoner release fiasco played out the final hours of campaigning in the elections for some 4,300 seats on 176 councils.
And Mr Blair managed to play a poor hand well with a classic performance which had Labour MPs temporarily cheering, minutes before they heard a statement from Mr Clarke in comparative silence, seemingly laden with doubt as to whether he can survive at the Home Office in the expected post-election reshuffle.
Mr Clarke again made plain his determination to do so in a statement updating MPs on the effort to track down the 79 most serious offenders among the 1,023 foreign prisoners released without being considered for deportation.
The home secretary appeared to recover some of his authority during his hour-long ordeal, helped by an overly detailed attack by Mr Davis. And like Mr Blair before him, Mr Clarke appeared emboldened by the intervention of former Conservative home secretary Michael Howard who, he said, was the one MP from whom he would take no strictures on the management of the Home Office.
However, Mr Howard outshone both Mr Davis and his party leader, Mr Cameron, spotting the apparent discrepancy between Mr Blair's suggestion that under the proposed new rules foreign criminals would "automatically" be deported, and Mr Clarke's assertion that "the presumption should be that deportation will follow unless there are special circumstances why it cannot". Amid suspicion of pre-election "spin", Mr Blair's official spokesman said the new proposals amounted to "the biggest change in deportation arrangements for a generation". Confirming the intention that the new deportation rules would apply to EU nationals as well as any other nationality, he added: "There are no countries that we do not presume that we can deport to. The only exception to that should be for operational reasons or if someone's life is in danger." However, there was no indication as to whether the Home Office has considered the position of Irish nationals under the new arrangements on which Mr Clarke will now consult, or whether a distinction could be drawn between persons committing offences while visiting the UK and Irish nationals normally resident in Britain. As at February 29th, there were 691 citizens of the Republic in prisons in England and Wales.
And the Home Office was forced to dispute claims by the UK Independence Party that the proposed new rules would breach a European directive which came into force just last Sunday preventing the deportation of EU nationals. UKIP leader Roger Knapman said EU Directive 2004/38 stated that "expulsion orders may not be issued by the host member state as a penalty or legal consequence of a custodial sentence".
UKIP is one of a number of minority parties, including the Greens, the British National Party and anti-war coalition Respect hoping to benefit from anti-government protest votes which some experts think will not automatically transfer straight from disillusioned Labour supporters to the Conservatives. The Conservatives are defending their "high water mark" success in the same elections four years ago, and need to show substantial net gains across the country as well as in London to put themselves seriously back in contention. However, betting experts Sporting Index have predicted Labour could lose control of nine of the 15 London borough councils they are defending, and some 260 councillors.