Calls grow for Brown to face challenge

Politicians from Britain's ruling Labour party, an ex-minister and newspaper editorials kept up a chorus of dissent against Prime Minister Gordon Brown yesterday, calling for his troubled leadership to be challenged.

Noises of revolt have been echoing within the Labour party for months, with Brown perceived by polls to lack vision and decisiveness in the job since succeeding Tony Blair last year.

The influential Sunday Times newspaper, owned by media tycoon Rupert Murdoch, said the only choice Brown now had was to try to silence his critics by putting himself up for a leadership contest, tackling the issue head on.

"For the good of country and party, the prime minister should tell his critics to put up or shut up," the newspaper, largely supportive of Labour over the past decade, wrote in an editorial. "Let us have a Labour leadership contest."

More senior Labour members of parliament have called for Brown to go, saying a change is needed as Labour prepares to hold its annual conference next week and before an election due by mid-2010.

Brown has sacked two senior Labour MPs in the past three days after they said he should face a leadership challenge.

A former minister and Brown special envoy, Barry Gardiner, added his voice to the rumblings of discord on Sunday by saying that Brown had squandered his international credibility and that Britain needed a leader with vision.

"The public has stopped listening to Gordon Brown," Gardiner wrote in an opinion editorial. "We have vacillation, loss of international credibility and timorous political manoeuvres that the public cannot understand".

Agencies

(China Daily 09/15/2008 page8)