Tony Blair subliminally rose as a knight in shining armor defiantly silencing contemptuous critics by becoming Britain’s first Labour leader to win a third straight term. This hat-trick knocked home an alarming caveat: Labour’s majority will decline to 66 seats from 161. Landslides of past years left far ashore. Rendering Labour a lame-duck strewn by internal arm-wrestling.

Labour scooped victory in 343 districts , enough for Tony to warm the seats at 10 Downing Street for another few years. Labour now lays its hands on the reins of power at the saddle of Westminster Abbey. The Conservatives won 187 seats and the Liberal Democrats 56. A hemorrhage in Labour’s vote accentuates the balkanized fragmentation of British politics.

Blair’s steel irrevocably dented by playing second fiddle to Uncle
Sam: witness a testosterone-fuelled war on Iraq. Despite implacable opponents, Blair homed in on emotive issues campaigning cavalierly on Britons to approve the Gordian knot of an EU Constitution in 2006’s referendum, to nod at investment in hospitals and schools, and flounce identification cards on the table for all British citizens. An issue hotly contested by civil liberties activists.

On the poker table of politics also resides Blair's proposal on
immigration: namely a ’points’’ system bequeathing skilled workers such as doctors and engineers priority entry to the U.K. Not dissimilar to the Green Card scheme heralded by Germany for the shining cyber-boys of Bangalore.

Speculation is rife that a reduced majority means chastised Blair is on a tighter leash, especially whilst trying to green-light incendiary policies as anti-terror laws and a revamped pensions system following the Equitable and Standard Life debacle.

Blair would strategically be compelled to, in a Kafka-induced metamorphosis, fine-tune his leadership stratagem in order to placate edgy members of his own party. The latter may twist his arm to drop divisive proposals, such as cuts to the civil service and a plan to allow patients to shop around for hospital treatment.

Campaigning with media-hyped arch-rival Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown, Blair underlined a bullish economy every quarter since 1991. The Bank of England’s benchmark lending rate averaged 5.25% since Labour arrived to the throne in 1997.

The rate is now 4.75% with CPI for March soldierly standing at 1.9%.
The U.K. GDP has grown for 31 quarters under Blair's mantle, the Treasury said in March that GDP rose 2.8% from a year earlier. 28.6 million people had jobs, the highest figure since comparable records began in 1971. The U.K.’s unemployment rate of 4.8% is lower than the 8.9% in the euro-zone.

Though the Conservatives vowed a tougher stance on immigration and lower taxes for pensioners, leader Michael Howard, 63, inter alia, due to a lack of "Weberian" charisma did not yield a promising electoral harvest.

The Liberal Democrats, the only caped-crusading Robin Hoods drawing daggers against a war in Iraq, will gain 11 seats to reach 62, according to BBC forecasts. The highest since the Liberal party won 59 seats in 1929. Something to behold: an era of three-party politics has ushered in as a cornerstone of British politics.

Indicative is that Blair’s approval rating trails Brown’s in opinion polls. Brown is waiting in the wings to capture Westminster's top job.
Expect to see power seeping through the thinly veneered walls of 11 Downing Street gracing the laps of grateful Gordon. Expect soap-opera dynasty-like bouts between Blair and Brown.

Die-hard left-wingers as well as staunch conservatives oppose the modernization agenda of what they perceive as "champagne socialism" by a showmanship-addled spin and smirk doctor named Tony Blair under the ill-suited garb of "New Labour".

Though not all clouds have silver linings. . The UK Confederation of British Industry estimated its gauge of retail sales recorded the steepest drop last month since July 1992, when Britain life buoyed from its cataclysmic recession.

An index by NTC Research Ltd. for the Chartered Institute of Purchasing and Supply fell to 49.5 in April from 51.6 in March, the first reading below 50 since June 2003.

Blair may be forced to raise taxes to curb the budget deficit, which stood at 34.2 billion pounds in the fiscal year ended March 31. That is 3.2% of GDP, more than the 3% threshold imposed by the Euro-cats in Brussels.

The London’s Institute for Fiscal Studies, estimated that government spending in the ensuing 3 years would outpace income by £11 billion pounds. Blair would thus either have to increase taxes or cut spending in his third term to bridge the nefarious gap.
The Treasury’s own estimates depict a tax burden on the economy will catapult to 40.6% of GDP by 2010. Currently income tax is plunked at 22% yet workers pay 40% on earnings above £32,400. Labour pledges not to alter income-tax rates in a third term, without extending this courtesy to corporate tax or national-insurance contributions, which are payroll levies incurred by both employers and workers that nourish funds for the National Health Service.

Dooms-day sooth-sayers or not, gleaming triumphal bravura is not an order du jour. A "Damoclean" sword hangs over the don Dionysius of Downing Street. The resulting years to come will reveal to all and sundry if Blair is up for the Herculean feat.