A funny thing is happening in British politics – Brown’s stock is rising as the stock market plummets.
The Independent reports that Brown has cut David Cameron’s poll lead to nine percentage points, reducing it to single digits for the first time since March.
This seems surprising given that Bush continues to languish in opinion polls and remains the most unpopular president in US history.
Both Brown and Bush gave the financial markets freedom to run riot and are now having to foot the markets’ bills. Yet only Bush is paying a political price for years of economic mismanagement.
The most obvious reason for this is the timing of the crash. The financial crisis has coincided with the US election and is pushing voters away from the Republicans.
In Britain an election isn’t expected until 2010 and so political battle lines are yet to be drawn. However, there’s good reason to suggest that Labour will continue to fare better than the Republicans. US voters appear to be shifting to the left in response to the crash, towards the ‘big government’ policies of Obama. As the so-called ‘left-wing’ party in Britain, Labour may be better placed to deal with the crash than the Conservatives.
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