If Brown loses in Britain we will feel a number of ripple effects here

AND so they’re off. The people of Britain, as long expected, are taking a trip to the polls on May 6.

Gordon Brown, like Brian Cowen, a prime minister after not so much as an election within the ruling party, could not postpone his day of reckoning with the voters any longer.

No previous post-war British prime minister with a working majority has gone into an election so far behind the main opposition — if some of the opinion polls are to be believed.

And if New Labour does indeed lose its grip on power next month — or in a second election later this year should the first prove indecisive — there will be inevitable consequences on this side of the Irish Sea, for the North, for European policy and, not least, because Britain is the first place politicians and civil servants here look to for interesting policy initiatives that can be translated to the Irish context (That isn’t cultural cringe, just a reflection of the fact of a shared media and that most people in Government Buildings don’t speak Swedish).

You will have spotted a couple of “ifs” in the previous paragraphs. For all but the first brief few weeks in 2007 immediately after Brown finally replaced Tony Blair and his “not flash, just Gordon” image seemed to go down rather well, the confident prediction had been that David Cameron was set to be the youngest UK prime minister since Lord Liverpool took office in 1812. The Tories were consistently averaging 40% in the polls; Labour was 10 points adrift. In last year’s European elections, Labour only narrowly avoided coming fourth.

Around Christmas, however, there was a wobble. There is a British tradition in the phoney war period before any general election for journalists to talk up the possibility of a hung parliament.

In part, it is the media’s signal to their readers, viewers and listeners that, having ignored the third party, the Liberal Democrats, since the last election, they are going to start mentioning them again because they are obliged to under electoral law.

In every previous run-up period since 1992 the hung parliament story has been stillborn: Labour was so patently on course to win that anyone discussing hung parliaments with any degree of seriousness looked like a fool — or a Liberal Democrat. This time, it has been different. Britain’s quaint but ruthless electoral system is largely to blame.

In parliamentary terms, the 2005 election represented yet another stuffing for the Tories: they won just 198 seats to Labour’s 356. But look at the vote share. Yes, 9.6 million people voted for Labour but almost as many — 8.8 million — voted for a Conservative Party which fought an uncompromisingly right-wing campaign best remembered for its “Are you thinking what we’re thinking?” anti-immigration message.

In other words, the seat distribution in Britain is so massively skewed in Labour’s favour that the Tories have to be not just ahead, but comfortably ahead in terms of votes, to be in with a chance of forming a government.

But in February, when you consider they are fighting against a party which has practically bankrupted Britain, which is led by a prime minister loathed even by his own aides and senior ministers, the Tories, remarkably, were just six points in front.

Assuming a uniform swing, even if the Tories had “won”, the likelihood is that Gordon Brown would have been able to cling on by cutting a deal with minor parties. Some polls last month pointed to even further narrowing. Suddenly, the election became more exciting and competitive than once seemed possible.

It wasn’t that the Brits had suddenly become less hostile to Gordon “Bully” Brown. Nor was the economy much of a factor: an 0.1% “recovery” is so faint as to be imperceptible. Rather, the Tory campaign stagnated. The policies seemed hazy and their “change” slogan spoke to British voters’ desire to be rid of Brown but also to their general disillusionment with politicians following the expenses scandal.

It should never be forgotten that, regardless of what the media says, many floating voters will not, on a point of principle, vote for a Tory they perceive as posh — and Cameron was unquestionably born fortunate. The Thatcher era has also achieved folkloric status: a golden era for right-wingers; a decade of state-sponsored cruelty for the left.

No amount of evidence will convince some that the Tory agenda isn’t to snatch food out of the mouths of the hungry, to kill off the old by cutting off their heating fuel in the winter.

Comparisons were beginning to be made between Cameron and Neil Kinnock, under whom the Labour party led in the polls for a long period only to lose out to John Major’s Conservatives in the final stages of the 1992 campaign.

What did it for Kinnock was that enough British people couldn’t bear the thought of the “Welsh windbag” being allowed into their homes every night via the television.

After last week, though, there are some small signs that the Tories’ wobble is over. Again, it wasn’t any change in attitude among British voters to Brown: he still looks cursed. Rather, the Tories started to fight — instead of waiting for the clock to run down to the big day, hoping against hope none of their senior figures screws up.

Their right wing would like to believe the party’s promise of a few extra quid for married — and civilly partnered — couples was decisive. But this was hardly new: Cameron has been stressing the importance of stable family relationships ever since he became Tory leader in December 2005.

Instead, the crucial factor was to unveil a policy that threw the essential difference between the two main parties into sharp relief — to cut what Britons call national insurance, an employment tax Labour wants to raise.

THE Tories are saying wealth and job creation are what will most help the less well-off in the long-run; Labour that they need social protection here and now.

For all the (overdone) talk about classlessness, this fundamental dichotomy in economic approach between the two main British parties is a century old.

But if that all sounds a little Marxian, the Conservatives have decided man cannot live by bread alone: economic responsibility must be matched by social responsibility. The problem with welfare, they say, is not just that it causes the poor to become dependent but that it encourages the better-off to think that the problems of the rest of society are nothing to do with them.

Irish social policy never went quite as far down the state socialist route as Britain, of course. But even here, there is a sense we are becoming strangers one from another and that if the church is not necessarily the most trusted provider of some services, neither is the state.

I will return to the “big picture” effects of the British election, but if the Tories can find ways of devolving power down to local communities and incentivising the “haves” to play a part in helping the “have-nots”, policymakers in Ireland will be paying close attention.

For now, though, the joy is in the spectacle of a closely fought campaign.