If you indeed do think those things, please explain why. and while you are at it, please also explain why the per capita GDP is so much higher since the decline of UK manufacturing.

- Josh

The compromises inherent in getting elected by a popular majority will inevitably mean that no politician can be completely embody everything we want from them. They will always disappoint us if we set ourselves up this way. Remember, at their heart they are all politicians, a profession I have little respect for.

I can fantasize for a moment that if Reagan for instance had had full discretion (i.e., didn’t have to shove everything through a hostile congress) that his 8 years would have ended with everything I wanted from my government (or even less!). But of course that would mean he would have been a virtual dictator, which is bad even if the dictator enacts all policies which you would agree with.

In short if history really does depend on the right person being in the right elected office at the right time, eventually we are all doomed.

Since when are either of these libertarian polcies?

Anarchist policies sure, but not libertarian.

Anyway, God bless Lady Thatcher and God bless the Anglosphere.

By the time the next election rolled round, I agree, he’d got a handle on how to whack electoral dissent around the head and shoulders (by means of the blunt instruments of the EU and his deeply insulting “consitutional reforms”) without resorting to anything too dramatic.

That they have enervated the electoral process, as you correctly say, David, is now working against them, as the British are getting their appetite up for a fight and they don’t want to have to pick their way through a thicket of cottonwool third way platitudes to get to the bits that are relevant to them.

In terms of the late departed ‘Friends’, Blair is Big Tenty Guy. Millennium Domey guy. S-o-o-o not now guy …

Hmmm. I’m not so sure. Because I am not so sure, with the fascist lefty mindset of the time, that there would have been regular elections thenceforth. I have a feeling that a “national emergency” might have been employed to delay holding elections.

I actually feared that Blair was going to try to pull something like this off – because he is so rigidly certain that he is the only person qualified to be the head of British government, and that his ideas have to be set in concrete whether the electorate likes it or not. I emailed a friend after Blair had been in for around six months and he and the Tsarina had already began to coil themselves around ancient British liberties and start squeezing the life out of our body politic (as in curtailment of freedom of speech) that I betted Blair would find a way to postpone the next election.

I still think it was his ambitions in Europe and his desire not to be seen as too Hitlerian on the continent which deterred him from trying.

Yes, I’ll gladly hoist a glass to Lady Thatcher and sing a verse of “Rule Britannia” as well. I don’t expect to see the United States have a better friend in my lifetime. May we never again need one so badly as we did her then. The evil fortune that has come on the Conservative Party since they so sleazily dumped that marvelous woman is nothing more than karmic retribution. She deserved much, much better than that.

We all owe her and Ronald Reagan a great debt for their courage in adversity. I remember what it looked like in the late 70′s under Carter and Callaghan. There was a sense that the West was failing, not so much because of the Communists but due to its own internal contradictions. What we desperately needed was inspirational, courageous leadership, and those two provided it in spades. What else could explain such vicious, violent, froth-mouthed vituperation from their enemies? Celebrate her while you can. It will probably be a long time before we see her like again.

Yet it would appear that she put and end to that and set the country back to the lead of prosperity – while incidentally my country, just on the other side of the channel kept sinking slowly – just for some to complain that they can’t get hardcore porn by mail?

If it urges you that much guys, why don’t you just fly to France?

If the planes, trains, buses and roads aren’t blocked by strikes, and if the print and press delivery staffs are indeed printing and delivering, you’ll get all the filth your heart desire.

‘course, when I say ‘heart’…