By Dipankar De Sarkar, IANS
London : Shrugging off a bad weekend at office, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown Monday announced the halving of British troops in Iraq and defended his decision not to call general elections this year saying he needs more time to translate his vision for Britain into action.
Brown told the parliament that the number of British troops will come down from around 5,500 now to 4,500 by the year-end. There will then be a reduction to 2,500 beginning April next year, with those deployed in Iraq steadily moving on from a combat role to one of overwatch, involving training and mentoring
The Iraq announcement came after he was forced to make a stout defence of his decision at the weekend not to call a mid-term general election.
“Yes, I did consider holding elections, but went with my first instinct, which was to get on with the job of implementing my vision” for Britain, Brown told a crowded press conference.
The British Premier came under strong attack from the media and from his political opponents for doing an apparent u-turn after his aides had suggested over the past weeks that he would declare mid-term polls.
But Brown not only discounted the possibility of immediate elections in a televised interview Sunday, but even suggested that he may have to hold out until 2009.
Smarting under criticism that he was guilty of the sort of political spinning that his predecessor Tony Blair was known for, Brown said Monday the only reason he decided not to declare elections was that he needed more time to put in place “my vision of how we meet the rising aspirations of the British people” – particularly in the vital areas of constitutional reforms, health, education and economy.
Key radical proposals that Brown intends rolling out are a written constitution for Britain, gearing the state health system toward responding to individuals and preventive healthcare, and improving the state education system so that it caters to talented schoolchildren.
The process by which he plans to do so includes building up a grassroots consultative process that will include ‘people’s juries’, and deliberative assemblies made up of the British public, Brown said.
Brown was forced to go on the defensive after Tory leader David Cameron bounced back in the opinion ratings after trailing Labour for a few weeks, saying the prime minister was treating the electorate like “fools.”
“Everybody knows he is not having an election because there’s a danger of him losing it. I think it will rebound on him very badly,” Cameron said. The Liberal Democrats said the episode was “deeply damaging”.
Brown was also criticised for the timing of a leak – which came during the Tory’s annual party conference last week – of the withdrawal of a proportion British troops from Iraq by next April.
Speculation had been mounting that the prime minister would call a November election after changes to Parliamentary announcements, such as a statement on Iraq, which was brought forward to Monday.
Brown succeeded Tony Blair as the longest-serving Labour Party prime minister earlier this year and is widely considered the most likely candidate to win the next general elections, in spite of the fact that some opinion polls put the Tories marginally ahead of Labour.
Widely respected for his role – as Blair’s finance minister – for putting the British economy on a path of steady and consistent economic growth, Brown took over after Blair was forced to quit over Britain’s role in Iraq.