Using NewsHour Extra Feature Stories

Overview: NewsHour Extra feature stories can help students identify and interpret key issues in current events. This activity anticipates one class period, but the follow-up essay might be assigned as homework or in another period.

Warm Up: Use initiating questions to introduce the topic and find out how much your students know.

Main Activity: Have students read NewsHour Extra's feature story and answer the questions on the reading comprehension handout.

Discussion: Use discussion questions to encourage students to think about how the issues outlined in the story affect their lives and express and debate different opinions.

Follow-up: Students can write a 500-word editorial on the topic expressing their views and send it to NewsHour Extra [extra@newshour.org] for possible publication.

Evaluation: Students are graded on their answers to reading comprehension questions and/or their editorial.

Story: Tony Blair's Alliance to U.S. Could Cost Him British Election: 05/04/05
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/extra/features/jan-june05/blair_5-04.html

Initiating Questions:

1. Who is Tony Blair?

2. What is Britain's relationship to the U.S.?

3. Does it have a similar type of government to the U.S.?

Reading Comprehension Questions: (click here for printout)

1. What decision will British voters make on Thursday?

In the country's first general election since the Iraq war, voters will go to the polls to determine whether to keep Prime Minister Tony Blair's Labour Party in office or elect the Conservative Party led by Blair's main opponent Michael Howard.

2. What is one of the key issues in the election?

Blair has been trying to focus the nation's attention on issues such as the economy, jobs, health care and immigration, but lingering disapproval of his decision to back President Bush's invasion of Iraq keeps resurfacing.

3. How long has Tony Blair been Britain's prime minister?

Tony Blair took office in 1997, when President Clinton was in the White House. He was re-elected in 2001 and has led the United Kingdom's government since. Queen Elizabeth is the official head of state of the monarchy, but her role is mostly symbolic.

4. What are the country's three main political parties?

As head of the Labour Party, Blair leads a coalition of smaller affiliated organizations including trade unions and other socialist groups that advocate government involvement in a democratic society. The party, similar to the Democratic Party in the United States, is considered to be slightly left of center on the political ideology scale.

The Conservative Party, sometimes referred to as Tories after the 17th-century political party from which it descended, and the Liberal Democrats make up the remainder of Britain's three-party system. Blair is the Labour Party's longest-serving prime minister in history.

5. Why did Blair decide to send troops to Iraq?

Blair's main argument for going to war, like President Bush's, was that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. That assumption was later found to be based on faulty intelligence, and some members of the Labour Party accused Blair of lying to the public.

6. Was it a popular decision?

One member of the British government called for Blair's impeachment and British cartoonists drew images depicting Blair as President Bush's poodle.

Blair denies lying to voters and has said his reasons for going to war were honest.

"I do not seek unpopularity as a badge of honor, but sometimes it is the price of leadership and it is the cost of conviction," Blair said at the height of the protests in 2003.

"And as you watch your TV pictures of the march, just ponder this: If there are 500,000 on that march, that is still less than the number of people whose deaths Saddam Hussein has been responsible for."

7. Is Blair likely to win a third term in office?

Despite the criticism, Blair is not expected to lose his seat. British polls show the prime minister's party ahead 42 percent to the Conservative Party's 29 percent. The Liberal Democratic Party has 21 percent.

But, a survey taken by MORI, a British market research company, shows the race tighter among registered voters who are expected to actually come out to the polls. According to the survey, Blair has a narrow 3 percent lead among definite voters.

Discussion Activity (more research might be needed):

1. How was the response of British voters to Tony Blair's decision to take England to war similar or different from the response President Bush received from American voters?

2. What does U.K. stand for? Why are there so many other names for the same place? It is often referred to as Britain, England and the U.K. Which is correct? What do the different names refer to?

3. The British government is a constitutional monarchy. What does that mean? How is it different to the American form of government?

Write a 300-500 word essay on either of these topics providing clear examples. Send your completed editorial to NewsHour Extra (extra@newshour.org). Exceptional essays might be published on our Web site.