This article from the Economist has been published the 29th of April 2010. It is titled “Who should govern Britain?”

This article from the Economist has been published the 29th of April 2010. It is titled “Who should govern Britain?” indeed it has been published a week before the general elections in Britain in 2010. In this subjective article, the journalist is explaining and augmenting precisely his newspaper own point of view about the campaign and the candidates. The Economist’s editorial is liberal although it has taken sides for Conservatives as well as for Labour since its creation like it is reminded in the article. As the article’s subtitle announces, The Economist believe that the Conservatives “deserve to win” basing its judgement “on policies rather than on hypotheticals”. Now how does The Economist’s journalist judges the policies and intentions of the three main political parties and how does he arrives to the conclusion that the conservators deserves to win? Two main lines can be highlighted in this article; on the one hand the main political and economic problems of Great-Britain and the Labour’s assessment with Gordon Brown. On the other hand the article is analysing the alternatives to Labour: the Conservatives and the Liberal-Democrats.

The journalist starts with describing the new challenges that the election’s winner is going to have to confront with. The first one is the new order about the electoral system: “the old duopoly”, the perpetual alternation between the Labour and the Conservatives and the first-past-the-post system (people get a single vote for who they want to represent their constituency whichever candidates who gets the most votes wins) has changed into a system where the two old parties have to deal with the Liberal-Democrats which “could make huge differences” in the seats’ repartition. A week before the general election of 2010, a hung-parliament was already expected. According to the journalist, this exceptional situation should be the occasion for British people to focus on the party’s polities and leaders, on the “substantial issues”. The main issue seems to be the economic situation to the journalist’s opinion: he feels a reform of the public sector, tax rises and spending cuts are inevitable in order to fill in the budget deficit that he qualifies of “terrifying” according to the fact that it represents 11.6% of the Gross Domestic Product.

In order to give more credibility to his article and to The Economist’s position, the journalist reminds his readers that The Economist is an independent newspaper and that him and his colleagues supported different political leaders who didn’t necessary agreed with the political and economic freedom encouraged by The Economist’s journalists.

Gordon Brown’s action as Prime Minister comes next in the article. The journalist estimates that Gordon Brown did what needed to be done considering the international situation: protecting the country’s economy from resection and the international

...