[Dante Hicks]

Originally Posted by dda

Does this mean that the British people have begun to be fed up with socialism and are secretly longing for a George Bushish leader?

The Labour Party are not, and have not been for a long time, under any reasonable definition a "socialist" party. I'd say they've not been a socialist party for 80 or so years, but certainly not since the abolition of 'Clause 4'.

The recent elections are a sign that the Labour Party are less popular, but it's not clear that there is any genuine shift to the right. The Tories made significant gains, but a lot of that is protest voting, i.e. voting against the government. In a small pocket in East London the shift was from Labour Party to the Respect Party (i.e. left-wing anti-war party). In other areas (e.g. Lewisham in South East London) the shift was to the Green Party (who are to the left of Labour on almost every conceivable issue). In other areas the right-wing BNP did reasonably well. In all cases votes were probably against rather than for.

The Conservatives do not actually have any major policy where they stand significantly to the right of the government (or at least not one they publically debate very often), and in fact on ID cards they are promising a slightly more libertarian approach. In every other major policy, the Tories seem unwilling to break the consensus that has been in place for a few years now.

The only real story was how dismal our third party (the Liberal Democrats) did, in comparison to the Tories.

I see that there have been shakeups in the government. Does this mean that T&F has lost or is in danger of losing his job?

Our civil service is theoretically non-political so it would make no difference to most of them who was in power. In practice some higher ups / ideologues might quit, but most of them would not have to.

What is going on?

Not a lot. It is probably similar to American politics - many people are dissatisfied in a general sense, but there is no real desire to step outside the consensus which broadly exists for the three parties. Even where there is a controversial issue (e.g. the war) it is not bloody or expensive enough for us to really become a vote winning issue. Like in the US, both our main parties were (and are) for the war. The difference is that the majority of Britons were (and probably still are, I'm not sure) against it.

British politics main issues over the last couple of months (according to a cursory glance at the media) :

- Crime (both parties broadly promise more vengeance, especially against foriegners)
- Economy (both parties promise to do nothing at all)
- ID Cards (there is some difference here, our government seem to be intent on pushing forward)
- Immigration (some vague talk about "getting tough" but the broad realisation that outside of BNP fantasies about repatriation, nothing much will change)
- Europe (some differences here although it's not discussed much recently)
- Running of public services, especially health (both parties promise better public services but don't really want to discuss how they're going to pay for it. Both are for internal market mechanisms which will apparently reduce costs and increase choice)
- Local taxes ('council' taxes which everyone pays, per household are considered too high and as they reflect property values they will get much higher. Both parties want to reform them, although it's not clear how).
- Housing (both parties promise to look at housing supply while doing very little to deal with the issue. Both give broad support to low cost home ownership iniatives - e.g. shared ownership, key worker accomodation, etc)

There's other stuff but you get the idea. It's all pretty much the same. The major parties will all have some sort of gimmick (who knows, maybe the Tories will push a flat rate tax) but it makes very little difference.