Brown Bottle

Broon bottles it says the BBC. Well no, they put it more politely: "Gordon Brown has said he will not call a general election this autumn". Jolly good, all the politico-types can go back to sleep again. Of course, the true Brown Bottle (scroll to the bottom) was in Viz, but it proven hard to find a picture online.

From the point of view of the smaller parties (Green :-) this is a relief and will make my personal autumn a bit easier. But where does it leave Brown?

Looking fairly stupid says Beeb blogoid, which is what I thought. As far as I can tell Broon only talked about the election to tweak his opponents a bit, and make them waste some resources preparing for something they could never be sure would occur. I doubt he ever wanted one. But unfortunately for him a good Tory conference, and some crappy politicking by Broon (blatant attempts to overshadow the Troy conference by making announcements from Iraq during their week) lead to good poll ratings for the Tories, so now it looks like he is running away, and the Tories feel uplifted.

OTOH this is mostly political froth and will make precious little difference in the long run.

This may all seem a bit odd to sane overseas folk who have fixed term democracies (in case it isn't clear, the UK Prime Minister can call an election pretty well whenever (s)he likes). Indeed, it has led to a return of calls for fixed term parliments here (it was Labour policy in 1992 under Kinnochio). That might just be the upside of all this nonsense.