i am curious, too, about the impact of blair’s near-evangelical religious beliefs, which, apparently, were a source of simpatico with bush … it seems to me that labour’s platform (and, indeed, european politics in general) would be fairly agnostic … i’m wondering if we have a similar situation of righteousness standing in the way of adherence to platform ideals. that, maybe, this righteousness is an explanation for the backtracking/backstabbing during blair’s tenure. it explains a lot of the nuttiness martin brings up and explains why it was so easy to bring blair into the neocon fold.

of course, it could be, too, that, like d-notice says, labour’s implosion was due to one-upsmanship … an affliction that has hit senate democrats on more than one occasion during the bush years.

great post, though!

Most Americans support 2nd and 3rd trimester restrictions with the ‘big three’ exceptions. That is an enormous leap from Obama’s pro-abortion position.

Where did Blair go wrong? He lied constantly, his government was as corrupt as anything that came before it, foot and mouth, obsession with celebrities, he and Brown turned out to be effectively neo-Thatcherites economically, and all of this was before he decide to adopt America’s neo-conservative foreign policy…

A lot of people over here have noticed the parallels between Labour’s/Blair’s landslide win in ’97 and the Democrat’s/Obama’s win: both came to power led by a young, intelligent, liberal-minded leader, on a mandate of change as the public had had more than enough of the corruption of the previous right-wing government.

Labour’s problems started long before Iraq: early on they noticed that the way to get support in the media is to pass laws which appease the tabloid newspapers, which turned some people against them.

There was then, a few months after them coming to power, a scandal over a ban on tobacco advertising, from which they exempted motor-racing – allegedly because they had been given £1 million which was given back. (Blair later went on TV and said “I’m a pretty straight kinda guy”).

They also turned other people against them by reducing benefits for single mothers amongst others.

In their manifesto for the ’01 election – which they won due to a lack of any serious opposition – they stated that they would not introduce extra charges for university tuition, only to do so later on. Then Iraq happened and with it the general curtail of civil liberties, including ID cards, anti-terrorism laws (including an attempt to allow the police 90 days before being forced to charge someone with a crime; they got 28 days instead, which is up from, I believe, 7 days before 9/11), bans on protests around Parliament and the scrapping of double jeopardy.

Labour won the election in May ’05 as although their support had collapsed, it fragmented between the various opposition parties and so they got back into power, albeit with a significantly reduced majority in Parliament (I believe there was a statistic which said that which they won 30 seats by about a total of 20,000 votes, which is nothing at all, and another which said more people didn’t vote at all than voted for them).

It is very unlikely that Labour will win next time round, irrespective of the state of the economy – in fact the opinion polls have had them less behind in the past few months – mainly because they turned off people who had previously supported them and so a lot of left-wing people say that a defeat would be their own fault.

I can only hope that the same doesn’t happen to Obama.