That’s one view of the Brit election tomorrow:
Assuming Labour wins, it will be the seventh victory in a row for Margaret Thatcher. It will deliver her a round 30 years of supremacy over British government, equalling the epoch of Attlee’s welfare socialism after 1945. Labour’s manifesto is a Thatcherite classic: adventurism abroad and progressive privatisation at home, moral partiality bolted on to an ever-expanding nanny State. The consensus is well illustrated in the near-identical proposals for public services from Labour and Conservatives. Both have pandered to middle-class insecurity. They have used fear, crime, discipline and control as leitmotifs and promised to curb civil liberty and make the welfare state increasingly optional. Baroness Thatcher may have disappeared to Venice for the duration, but she can look back on this campaign with pride. She destroyed the Social Democrats, she destroyed old Labour and, in stimulating the creation of new Labour, she has all but destroyed the Tories.
The key test of political longevity is whether your political opponents eventually adopt your new consensus. The only flaw in this reasoning is that Simon Jenkins misses the premiership of John Major. If the Tories had not won their post-Thatcher victory, Blair would never have emerged to save Labour. It was Major who reconciled the country to Thatcherism – by winning an election as a Tory who was not Thatcher. For what it’s worth: I’d vote Tory this time. Blair will win anyway. But his creeping expansion of the welfare state must be resisted and reversed. Another Labour victory might just convince the Tories to go back to advocating much lower taxation, a smaller state and far more decentralization. Here’s hoping.
The Dish 