WI: Blair called a snap election post 9/11?

For those ridiculing the idea of Blair calling a snap election after September 11, saying he’d be laughed at and ridiculed behind closed doors or that the voters would see right through him and desert Labour in droves, it is worth noting that Australian Prime Minister Howard did exactly that; the election was announced on October 8th and held on November 10th. The government increased its vote by 2% and picked up two more seats.

If Blair had not called the June 2001 election, I would say he would almost certainly have taken Britain to the polls shortly in November ’01 and would have won a landslide that would have dwarfed what he got in June ‘01 IOT.

Well, there you go. And Howard always came off to me as a slimy Dick Cheney type, so I imagine Blair would be able to pull this off even moreso.
 
For those ridiculing the idea of Blair calling a snap election after September 11, saying he’d be laughed at and ridiculed behind closed doors or that the voters would see right through him and desert Labour in droves, it is worth noting that Australian Prime Minister Howard did exactly that; the election was announced on October 8th and held on November 10th. The government increased its vote by 2% and picked up two more seats.

The election was more or less scheduled to happen then, was it not? The previous election was in October '98. And Labor had been running ahead of the Coalition in the polls for much of that year, yes?

There's a bit of a difference between an election just occuring post-9/11 by natural happenstance, and a deliberate and clear decision to cash in on that environment. That said I don't agree that Blair would be laughed out of court. Prime Ministers generally do - or should I say, did in the day - call elections when they thought they could win them. It's hardly unprecedented that an election would be called after susbtantial and violent events.

My objection here is threefold:

One, the train of events needed to lead to a postponement that long is frankly pretty incredible;

Two, if it had been postponed that long there is, as I've said, a clear bias against holding elections in Autumn, particularly amongst Labour people;

Three, if people keep asserting that Blair would utterly demolish the Tories beyond OTL then it is a reasonable question to ask why John Howard only managed to inch Labor in these circumstances. Now you would say that John Howard is no Blair and had been trailing against the opposition, but even so, Howard only just scraped it. It doesn't seem that there's the towering 9/11 bounce that people assume.

Above all, though, the premise of this is simply wrong. It's innacurate to say that Blair recieved a sustained or substantial bounce after 9/11 from the basis on which he was already polling. Blair was already hitting fifty percent or so well before 9/11 - and these polls had tended to overestimate Labour's lead in the run up to '97 and '01. If Blair recieved any bounce in '01 that I can see, it was simply the one people often get from being re-elected.
 
For those ridiculing the idea of Blair calling a snap election after September 11, saying he’d be laughed at and ridiculed behind closed doors or that the voters would see right through him and desert Labour in droves, it is worth noting that Australian Prime Minister Howard did exactly that; the election was announced on October 8th and held on November 10th. The government increased its vote by 2% and picked up two more seats.

If Blair had not called the June 2001 election, I would say he would almost certainly have taken Britain to the polls shortly in November ’01 and would have won a landslide that would have dwarfed what he got in June ‘01 IOT.

But that's not what I was 'ridiculing'. I was ridiculing the idea of Blair calling (or even thinking of calling) a snap election immediately after 9/11 when we'd had an election six months earlier. Howard may have called an election sooner than expected (I don't know the ins and outs), but as V-J said, the last election had been in 1998 and at a time of global crisis it isn't that absurd, and evidently it wasn't, because he won (as you say).
 
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