Posted on 05/05/2006 4:39:01 AM PDT by gitmogrunt
By BETH GARDINER, Associated Press Writer
LONDON - Prime Minister Tony Blair fired his law and order chief Friday and chose a new foreign secretary in a wide-ranging Cabinet shuffle a day after his party took a pounding in local elections.
The Labour Party pulled 26 percent of the vote to the Conservatives 40 percent, a result that renewed calls from some quarters for the prime minister to step down.
Home Secretary Charles Clarke, embroiled in a politically damaging furor over the failure to deport foreign criminals, confirmed that Blair had removed him from office. Defense Secretary John Reid was moved to the Home Office, and Des Browne was promoted from chief secretary at the Treasury to secretary of defense.
Blair removed Jack Straw as foreign secretary, replacing him with Margaret Beckett, who had headed the Department of Environment, Food and Rural Affairs. She becomes the first woman to hold the job.
Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott, who admitted an affair with a secretary, will keep his title but was stripped of the responsibilities of his department, which include housing and planning.
"I felt that it was very difficult, given the level of genuine public concern, for Charles to continue" as home secretary, said Blair, who days earlier had defended Clarke as the right man to deal with the prisoner issue.
Clarke said he had turned down offers of other government posts. "I do not think it would be appropriate to remain in this government in these circumstances," Clarke said in a statement.
The shake-up appeared aimed at demonstrating Blair still holds a firm grip on his beleaguered government after weeks of negative headlines and scandal.
"It'll take far more than a reshuffle," Conservative Party leader David Cameron said. "What we need in this country is a replacement of the government."
"I think what we have seen over the last few hours is that while the Labour Party is collapsing, the Conservative Party is building," Cameron said as he toured London to celebrate his party's gains in the local elections.
Glenda Jackson, a former Labour government minister who has been a persistent critic of Blair, joined the calls for him to go. "The problem for the party and its government is its leader," she said.
Thursday's vote was widely seen as a referendum on Blair's government, and Cameron emerged as the main winner.
"I'm a happy man this morning," said Cameron, who took over the party in December.
Labour took 1,065 seats in incomplete counting, down 251 seats compared with the results of the last election. The Conservatives won 1,567 seats, a gain of 249. Labour lost control of 16 local councils — including some boroughs in London — and the Tories gained eight.
The far-right British National Party won 13 seats.
Labour also did badly in the 2004 local vote but that didn't stop Blair from leading the party to its third straight national election victory a year later — albeit with a reduced majority in the House of Commons.
Treasury chief Gordon Brown, the main expected to succeed Blair, said voters were concerned about issues of crime, terrorism and their financial and job security. "We've got to show in the next few days, not just in the next few weeks, that we are sorting these problems out," he told British Broadcasting Corp. radio.
Voters in Thursday's elections chose representatives to fill 4,360 seats in 176 local authorities across England, a little less than half of all English councils. London was the biggest battleground, with elections in all 32 boroughs.
Labour's poor showing was likely to embolden those calling for Blair to step down soon or at least offer a timeline as to when he may leave office.
Most Labour members of Parliament "are saying now that we've got to get the party under new management. It ought to happen fairly soon," said Frank Dobson, who was health secretary in Blair's first Cabinet.
The government's acknowledgment last week that officials had failed to screen 1,023 foreign criminals for deportation before freeing them from prison over the past seven years was particularly damaging.
___
Associated Press writers Beth Gardiner and Daniel Woolls contributed to this story.
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BTTT
Blair is finished as PM. And no, it's not because of the WOT at all. Blair's domestic policies have consisted of nothing but more regulations, more laws, bigger government, higher taxes and more sell-out to the undemocratic EU.
Time for him to go. Not that Brown would be much better though.
Tune up, get the sour notes out. Bush needs to do more of the same.
It's just a guess, but I would go with: incompetence, and a "I work for the Goverment so I can't be sacked" attitude in the various parts of the Civil Service that messed the deportations up.
About time too, roll on the next Conservative govt.
I have some knowledge of this, the problem is receiving the correct information in a timely fashion.
The problem is where data and information is concerned we are still very much in the dark times, with all prisons, courts, probation home office having there own data storage, so if you transfer a prisoner from one prison to another, all data has to be copied down put in a file sent to the next Prison and then re entered onto there system.
Dealing with other departments in other ministries is even worse.
There is a new System coming into place PRIME (Prison Record Management Environment) All data will be stored centrally no need for bulky files will also save on Prison Officer Man hours, it will also link to the Police, Home Office, Probation and courts.
So when a prisoner is flagged for release who ever needs to know will be contacted electronically.
So if there is a deportation order flagged on his record then it will contact the relevant department in the Home Office to carry out.
Straw, is so consistently pro-islamo-fascism, makes me wonder how many saudi dollars have been deposited into his swiss bank account.
Then the Minister should be gone.
What you said!
It takes either an Islamofascist nutcase or a Dhimmi who hopes his subservience will spare him any discomfort to have supported the bombing of the Christian Serbs, thus supporting the jihadists in Kosovo-Metohija and Bosnia.
Anyone recall the "Yes,Minister/Yes, Prime Minister" series?
"Straw was a strident Euro-weenie advocate of the bombing in the Balkans and key architect of 21st Century Islamic Europe.His expertise will be greatly missed./sarcasm off"
Straw did not become Foreign Secretary until 2001. Robin Cook was foreign secretary at the time of the Balkan intervention and he and Tony Blair were the main movers in that.
for all, recent photo of myself in Iraq on my profile page.
God bless you, Desert Serb. :)
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