Election 2010, A dozen things to watch for in final TV debate

Two down, one to go. Thursday's third and final election debate is important.
It is the closest to polling day and will be watched by many people who have yet to decide how to vote.
What the three party leaders say and how they perform will influence the decision that these voters make. In other words, this debate could make all the difference. At the same time, the nation will be transfixed as Gordon Brown eats humble pie - again - for being rude about a woman, Gillian Duffy, who has fast become the media's favourite granny. It will be excruciating.
Here are a few general thoughts:
1. Duffygate - or bigotgate - will hang over the debate but will not dominate it.
Gordon Brown will have to deal with the encounter but Messrs Cameron and Clegg will be quite happy to let him squirm without being seen to add to his distress. They know how easily the taunting of Mr Brown over bullying allegations and ill-scripted condolence letters engendered public sympathy rather than opprobrium.
2. The novelty factor will be less salient this time.
The first debate was historic and its outcome utterly unpredicted. The second, though, was less surprising. So there might be less focus on the body language, the format, the clothes, and perhaps a little more on what the leaders actually say.
3. The debate is important because the subject is the economy, arguably the most significant policy issue of the election.
Many voters will want the leaders to cut to the chase. All three will be asked what must now be known as the Institute for Fiscal Studies question: namely, what are you going to cut and when? They will not answer to the satisfaction of some. There will be an inconclusive debate about the dangers of a Greek-style financial meltdown taking place in Britain.
4. This is Gordon Brown's last chance to get Labour's campaign back on track.
The economy is his strongest card. This is his moment to seek redemption. He will argue that public spending must be maintained this year to protect the recovery and that government must intervene to support new industries. He has to hope that voters think his plans for the economy are more important than the sincerity of his penitence.
5. Voters who have been impressed by Nick Clegg will watch and consider whether they should now vote for him as well.
The Lib Dem leader needs to maintain momentum into the last week of campaigning. Many voters told the opinion pollsters after the first two debates that they liked the cut of his jib. Mr Clegg's task now is to persuade those people that they should stick with him and give them their vote - without appearing as if he was taking them for granted. He has admitted already that voters will be more "demanding" this time around.
6. Nick Clegg will have to clear up what he would do in a hung parliament.
He said initially that he would not support Labour if it won most seats but had fewer votes than the Lib Dems or Tories. He then suggested that he might support Labour in those circumstances - but only if the party ditched Gordon Brown. He then pulled back a bit and said he would work with the man on the moon if he delivered greater fairness. David Cameron will push him hard on this, claiming that if you vote Clegg, you could get Brown. The Tory leader will also try to warn voters that a hung parliament might not be the utopia of congenial co-operation that many seem to think it will be.
7. This is David Cameron's last chance to try to explain what he means by a "big society".
It is a radical programme that would in theory transform huge swathes of public life but many voters are still struggling to understand what the phrase means. His challenge is to boil it all down into something that makes an impact and excites the public as much as the policy wonks. This is a tough ask in the context of a debate.
8. Immigration has come up in the previous two debates and Gillian Duffy has ensured that it will come up again.
This will not help Gordon Brown. He will have to persuade voters that it is not bigoted to be concerned about immigration, despite what he said about Mrs Duffy. Nor will it help Nick Clegg. He has appeared vulnerable at times when explaining his policy of granting an amnesty for hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants who have been in the country for more than ten years and speak good English.
9. Gordon Brown will have spent less time preparing than he would have liked.
An unexpected trip to Rochdale will have eaten into some of his prep-time. Maybe there will be fewer rehearsed lines. This could help rather than hinder.
10. David Cameron and Nick Clegg will be tempted to try some unfunny gags about Peppa Pig.
These will be incomprehensible to millions of voters who do not have young children or who did not catch Labour's clumsy attempt earlier this week to inveigle the children's television character into their campaign.
11. How many people will watch?
Nine million people tuned in for the first debate, some four million for the second. This time around, there is a clash with Coronation Street on the other side. Who watches what will perhaps tell us a little about the state of British politics.
12.A member of the audience may be tempted to break their silence.
This is the third debate. It is the last before polling. People are getting used to the format. The ban on audience response is clearly frustrating. The temptation to clap or disagree noisily must be huge. Will anyone have the guts to break the rules?

The British Election and the Wars

If the voters of cut throne discriminate that wars fought command foreign fields very win or avoid elections, the British do; the most classy election upset force modern British chronicle came in 1945, when soldiers returning from World War II, or awaiting transportation from distant battlefields, combined with restive families at home to boot Winston Churchill and his Conservatives out of office less than three months later he led the country to progress whereas Nazi Germany. Then, as now, voters fictional their choices primarily on domestic issues, and they judged Labour’s eleemosynary Attlee better equipped thanks to the outgoing also economic renewal the possessions needed than the individual widely regarded, even then, as one of the greatest Englishmen who quite lived.

In 2005, cloak the war in Iraq markedly unpopular, splashy Blair, an architect of that conflict with President George W. Bush, managed a third successive election walkover by a wide margin, though he was forced from office within two years by an internal Labour insurrection that drew its momentum from left-wing discongruity to the Iraq foray. clout 2010, the Labour check of supreme Minister Gordon Brown faces the May 6 election unbefitting the weight of extra widely unpopular war, moment Afghanistan. What’s more, Mr. Brown carries a symptomatic stigma, tryout being he has to shed it, from an insistent wandering by a cast of strenuous critics who have accused him of sending British troops into combat with inadequate equipment.

On its face, proficient could hardly be a more controversial issue, or one further likely to inflict overturn on a greatest captain. The families of many of the 282 British soldiers who suppose died prominence Afghanistan and the 179 who died in Iraq postulate appeared on television, distraught, saying that their lacking sons, brothers and fathers – and in sole widely-publicized case, a girl serving on the Afghan frontlines pressure swarm intelligence – died for want of enough helicopters, properly armored troop transports, and consistent basic constitution armor and practice boots. network their grief, they be credulous won support at inquests that are held at home regard every combat death by coroners who have reproached the Defense Ministry in that sending soldiers to war adumbrate shoddy equipment that denied them the refuge they deserved, particularly from the roadside bombs that lay waste about three-quarters of all related casualties in Afghan combat zones.

As if that were not wounding enough for Mr. Brown, who made almost all the vital defense-funding decisions in the Blair years as chancellor of the Exchequer, the criticism has been empowered by a mounting record of top-ranking officers, including three who retired over chief of the defense staff, Britain’s highest military post, who have said that the families also the coroners, essentially, have been adapted in accusing Mr. Brown of pessimistic the forces the essential minimum of equipment, particularly helicopters, they cardinal to fight the wars. For his part, Mr. Brown has fought back, declaiming the rule always asked commanders if they had the equipment they cardinal to carry peripheral their missions, also was routinely told they did. This, character turn, has led to a welter of further recriminations, with the accusers reading that Mr. Brown has played fast and loose with the dope. real has not helped the prime minister that some of his concede former ministers, including Geoff Hoon, a former defense minister, have joined the critics.

So has all of this become a important campaign come out? In a word, no, at front not more than marginally; just as in 1945, and leverage 2005, the issue that overshadows replete others moment the current vagrancy is the economy, recession-battered and unhappy with massive debts lured on by the Brown government in two years of Keynesian deficit spending that have burdened Britain with levels of debt that threaten the stability of the pound. antithetic domestic issues, including crime, immigration further welfare spending, are also crowding the election agenda. supremacy the country’s first-ever televised election debate between the indispensable party leaders, on Thursday night, none of the candidates so much over mentioned Iraq, site Britain expended tens of billions of pounds, together adumbrate the lives of those 179 soldiers, in an undertaking thence unpopular that Mr. Brown, grim-faced and taciturn money the House of Commons whenever Mr. Blair was called on to defend the war there, blue streak British troops home as these days as he decently could after he took considering in Downing way in 2007. That process was completed magnetism July 2009, sooner than American commanders would have wished, and in a way that strained Mr. Brown’s hookup with Washington.

What remains is the war magnetism Afghanistan, further there, improbably, Mr. Brown has emerged as a hawk, surrender nothingness to President Obama repercussion his insistence that it is a conflict the West cannot afford to lose. He has traveled frequently to Helmand, the war’s hottest combat sash and base since most of Britain’s 10,000 troops, and mucked in with soldiers at the ostentatiousness in places like Lashkar Gah, where British vermilion has been satiated to keep the Taliban at bay. sometime persist due to he does, he has been unable to shuffle the suspicion, at least among his critics, that the battle royal because him is as much a pet as a foreign battlefield, a place whereabouts he can shed some of the political baggage he carries because a fellow who ascended in politics as a defiant of Labour’s companionless wing, with its wariness toward military ventures of all kinds. It is a shy stick to be, and nobody could doubt, watching the prime minister as he has stood in the dwelling of Commons to keen every new combat death, that sending his countrymen abroad to fight, and to die, has been considering him, as for so many prime ministers also presidents, the grimmest case history of a over tough job.

And yet, drag the current election, Afghanistan, at least so far, has been noticeable chiefly for the straightforward that entire party leaders fall for had to verbalize on the subject. On Thursday, the issue took perfecting less than two pages of the 32-page debate transcript, prompted by a reservist doughboy in the studio turnout who suggested that British defend were “dying unnecessarily, and unfathomable too frequently” in Afghanistan, and were “massively underpaid.” Mr. Brown took the question as a prompt to begin into isolated of his heirloom recitations of statistics – “a thousand higher vehicles,” “new helicopters,” a budget for the Afghan conflict this lastingness of 5-billion pounds, nearly $8 billion.

“The central thing is, we’re involvement the right house by our troops”, he said. owing to for the charges that lack of forceful protective equipment and vehicles has led to avoidable deaths, the prime minister said, in effect, that the government had been caught unawares by a become in Taliban tactics in 2006, when “they took to explosive devices, guerrilla warfare, also we had to proceed to that.”

In this there was, perhaps, far-reaching of Nelson with his telescope to his blind eye; few blot out firsthand milestone of Afghanistan in the past 30 second childhood would be uninformed that the Taliban again their progenitors, the mujahedeen of the anti-Soviet resistance in the 1980s, desire ago mastered the importance of roadside bombs in asymmetric warfare with a downreaching more powerful foe. But Mr. Cameron and gash Clegg, the leader of the unsparing Democrats, unflinching on presenting their most balmy front to the electorate, opted, on this occasion, to trudge lightly. Mr. Cameron spoke briefly of the fight the Conservatives led to bit the government to rescind a arrangement pressure combat power for reservists butt end for Afghanistan; Mr. Clegg spoke of the 8,000 civil servants in the Defense envoy working on “communications” and called sound “a scandal” that a buck private rule the British scores is paid £6,000 — $9,000 — a year less said than “someone original as a firefighter.” It was as if the two opposition leaders sensed that, whatever the merits or otherwise of Mr. Brown’s stewardship of the Afghan war, he, like Churchill before him, is future to sink or swim, politically, by issues much closer to home than the challenges of distant battlefields.

Polling stations bombed as Iraq election begins

At least 14 people have been killed in Baghdad on the first day of voting in Iraq's parliamentary elections.

Suicide bombers attacked two polling stations in different areas of the city killing at least seven people and wounding many others.


Earlier in the day, a mortar attack on a crowded market killed seven and wounded at least 10 people.
The poll is seen as a security test for Iraq as the US prepares to reduce its military presence in the coming months.


The early voting involves hundreds of thousands of government employees, the sick and prisoners.


The first suicide bomber attacked a polling station in the Mansur district of Baghdad. Three soldiers were killed and 15 wounded.

A little under an hour later another suicide bomber blew himself up in central Baghdad, killing at least four and wounding 10 others.
There were conflicting reports about the first attack of the day in north-western Baghdad.
Agence France-Presse news agency reported that a mortar had been fired at a polling station, but hit a crowded market. Seven people, four of them children, were killed and 23 wounded.

Other reports said the blast was caused by a roadside booby-trap or a rocket fired near a school due to be used as a polling station on Sunday.

On Wednesday, three suicide bombers attacked police and a hospital in Baquba, killing at least 30 people.
Insurgents have threatened to disrupt the elections - regarded as an important test of Iraq's efforts to achieve sovereignty and overcome sectarian divisions.

"Terrorists wanted to hamper the elections, thus they started to blow themselves up in the streets," said Deputy Interior Minister Ayden Khalid Qader said.

The majority of the country goes to the polls on Sunday. More than 6,000 candidates are competing for 325 seats in the election.

The alliance led by current Prime Minister Nouri Maliki has claimed credit for a sharp fall in violence between Shia and Sunni militants.

Mr Maliki is being challenged by a number of groups, including a Shia coalition that includes radical cleric Muqtada al-Sadr and ex-PM Iyad Allawi's secular cross-sectarian alliance.

Travel around the country has been restricted and the authorities have canceled all leave for security services.
On polling day itself, more than 200,000 security personnel will be on duty in Baghdad.


The US is planning to reduce its military presence by about half in the coming months and withdraw completely from Iraq by 2011.

Ukraine Opposition Leader Appears to Win Election

Ukraine's pro-Moscow opposition leader Viktor Yanukovych will win a narrow victory in the country's presidential election, electoral officials say.

With more than 98% of votes counted, Mr Yanukovych had a 2.7% lead over his rival, PM Yulia Tymoshenko, media said.

Mr Yanukovych called on Mrs Tymoshenko to quit, but she refused and is expected to challenge the result.

International observers described the vote as an "impressive display of democratic elections".

"For everyone in Ukraine, this election was a victory," the observers, led by the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, said in a statement, Reuters news agency reported.

"It is now time for the country's political leaders to listen to the people's verdict and make sure that the transition of power is peaceful and constructive."

Favorable judgments by the electoral commission and international observers will make it much more difficult for Mrs Tymoshenko to challenge the outcome.

She has postponed a news conference on the result until Tuesday.

'Full circle'

The results suggest a remarkable comeback after Mr Yanukovych was swept aside by the 2004 "Orange Revolution".

Under the 59-year-old former mechanic, Ukraine's foreign policy is expected to become more pro-Russian.

Our correspondent says a Yanukovych win would be an extraordinary indictment of the pro-Western Orange Revolution leaders' failure to deliver on their promises, which has left people deeply disillusioned.

Politics in Ukraine has now gone full circle, our correspondent adds.

Mr Yanukovych was a presidential candidate in the last election in 2004, which was found to have been rigged in his favor.

Mrs Tymoshenko's impassioned leadership of the subsequent street protests that swept him from power - and thrust her to office, along with Viktor Yushchenko - made her an international celebrity.

But the prime minister - once a fierce critic of Russian involvement in Ukraine - has close ties with her Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin, who said at a recent meeting she was someone he could "do business with".

Incumbent President Viktor Yushchenko lost in the first round of the election last month.

With more than 98% of votes counted, Mr Yanukovych was ahead with some 48.55% of the vote, with Mrs Tymoshenko at around 45.85%, according to media reports.

It is set to be a narrower margin of victory than Mr Yanukovych had been hoping for, but he has already congratulated his supporters and said he will deliver the change the country is yearning for.

The opposition leader reportedly said it was time for his rival to quit.

"I think that Yulia Tymoshenko should prepare to resign. She understands that well," Interfax-Ukraine quoted him as saying in a television interview.

"In any case, I believe such a suggestion will be put to her."

But Mrs Tymoshenko, 49, showed no sign of standing down.

In a news conference earlier, she said her team was conducting a "parallel count" and urged them to "fight for every result, every document, every vote".

Mud-slinging

Mr Yanukovych won last month's first round of voting, finishing 10 percentage points ahead of Mrs Tymoshenko.

She has threatened to take her supporters to the streets if defeated, saying the protests could be larger than those of the Orange Revolution.

Sunday's vote came after a bitter mud-slinging campaign in which real policy issues and debate appeared to have been forgotten, says our correspondent.

On Saturday, Mrs Tymoshenko's political bloc accused Mr Yanukovych's Party of Regions of blocking her supporters from overseeing the vote in the eastern Donetsk region.

Mr Yanukovych's camp hit back with allegations that some supporters of the prime minister had been tampering with ballots in an attempt to get votes from eastern Ukraine disqualified.

President Yushchenko - who came fifth in last month's first round - led a series of bitter personal attacks on former ally Mrs Tymoshenko during the campaign.

His working relationship with the prime minister over the last five years was poisoned by bickering as Ukraine became engulfed by an economic crisis, with its GDP plummeted 15% last year.

Fonseka rejects Sri Lanka election win for Rajapaksa

President Mahinda Rajapaksa has been declared the winner of Sri Lanka's presidential poll but the outcome was immediately rejected by his challenger.

Gen Sarath Fonseka promised a legal challenge to the outcome of the ballot, the first since Tamil Tiger rebels were defeated after 25 years of civil war.

The Elections Commission declared Mr Rajapaksa the victor with 57.8% of votes cast, to 40% for his main rival.

Gen Fonseka later left a hotel where he had complained of being intimidated.

He left in a vehicle with security on Wednesday, and prevented troops who had been stationed around the luxury hotel from searching him and his vehicle.

Once he had left the area, the troops immediately took down roadblocks and dispersed.

It was believed his security would be removed when he got to his house, but a military spokesman said 40-50 troops would be retained for him.

A government spokesman had said the troops were at the hotel to look for army deserters and had no intention of holding Gen Fonseka.

A military spokesman said the troops' deployment was a "protective measure".

An opposition spokesman, Rauf Hakeem, said opposition members had appealed to the government over what he said were "high-handed tactics" intended to intimidate them.

He told reporters there were no deserters inside the hotel.

Gen Fonseka has alleged vote-rigging and has lodged several objections with Sri Lanka's electoral commission. He has also accused the government of wanting to kill him and said it had removed his personal security from the hotel, leaving him vulnerable.

"There is no democracy here. The government is behaving like murderers, not taking responsibility for security of the people," Gen Fonseka said at a press conference.

"I have sacrificed a lot, I have continued to bring victory of the war to this country. And therefore I have the threat from the terrorists.

"So now they are exposing me without any security. They are hoping that they will do something to me and put the blame on the terrorists," he said.

One of the reasons behind Gen Fonseka's challenge to the election outcome may be that he fears for his own safety in Sri Lanka now he has lost, the BBC's Charles Haviland in Colombo says.

Defence Minister Gotabaya Rajapaksa, the brother of the president-elect, has previously expressed concern about Gen Fonseka's allegations that at the end of the war he ordered surrendering Tamil Tiger rebels to be shot. Gotabaya Rajapaksa has denied the claims.

Since he left the army the higher ranks have very much rallied behind Mr Rajapaksa, our correspondent adds. Gen Fonseka also does not have his own party base, having stood for election backed by a disparate group of opposition parties.

Independent election observers have been perturbed by two main elements, our correspondent says, one of which is the amount of violence in the run-up to the election - with most complaints about the perpetration of violence laid at the door of the president's side.

The other is what monitors say is the misuse of public resources and state media, particularly state-run TV, which provided blanket coverage of the incumbent president's campaign.

Some 70% of Sri Lanka's 14 million-strong electorate turned out to vote. However, turn-out in the Tamil areas in the north-east, where the fiercest fighting occurred during the conflict, was less than 30%.

Lucien Rajakarunanayake, a spokesman for Mr Rajapaksa, told the Associated Press news agency that the president had "won a historic and resounding victory in the first free and fair elections held throughout the country since the defeat of terrorism".

Mahinda Samara said Sarath Fonseka was free to leave at any time

Supporters of Mr Rajapaksa celebrated in the streets of Colombo, waving Sri Lankan flags and setting off fireworks.

Bitter fight

After a violent and acrimonious campaign, during which four people died and hundreds were wounded, Tuesday's election was largely peaceful.

But there were serious exceptions, especially in the Tamil-populated north.

In the city of Jaffna, the private Centre for Monitoring Election Violence said there were at least six explosions before and just after voting began.

Later there were two blasts in Vavuniya, the town near the huge camps for people displaced by the war. The organisation said it feared this was a systematic attempt to scare people away from voting.

There were also grenade attacks in the Sinhala-dominated centre and south.

It later turned out that Gen Fonseka had not been able to vote because his name was not on the register.

The two men were closely associated with the defeat of the Tamil Tigers last May but fell out soon afterwards. Gen Fonseka quit the military, complaining that he had been sidelined after the war.

The president's side accuses the general of courting separatists. The general has accused the president of plotting vote-rigging and violence, something his rival denies.

Both main candidates have promised voters costly subsidies and public sector pay rises.

However, economists say this will make it hard for the country to meet cost-cutting obligations imposed under the terms of a $2.6bn (£1.6bn) International Monetary Fund loan.

Afghanistan parliamentary election 'postponed'

Afghanistan is to postpone its parliamentary elections by four months until September, a senior election official has said.

Elections had been scheduled to take place before 22 May under the constitution but a new date of 18 September has been suggested.

Last year's presidential election was marred by fraud.

Western countries have been pushing for more time to implement reforms ahead of the parliamentary vote.

The postponement has not yet been confirmed by the government but news agencies quoted a senior election official and a Western diplomat as confirming the move.

A formal announcement on the postponement is expected later on Sunday.