Wednesday, April 06, 2005

It surely is a puzzle

Damian Penny on the May 5 UK election:
Because of Blair's brave support for the ouster of Saddam and the war against Islamofascist terror, this is the first British election I can remember in which I, an unrepentant Thatcherite, would likely vote Labour.
And he points to Mark Steyn who sums it up nicely:
If I lived in Britain, I'd vote for Tony Blair's Labour party. Yes, yes, I know he's a nanny-state control-freak and you can hardly pull your pants on in the morning without filling in the form for the Public Trouser Usage Permit and undergoing inspection from the Gusset Regulatory Authority. But on the One Big Thing — the great issue of the age — he's right, and he's reliable. And, sad to say, the British Conservative party isn't. Their leader, Michael Howard, has been a cheesy opportunist on the war, supporting it at the time, backtracking later, his constantly evolving position twisting itself into a knot of contortions even John Kerry might find over-nuanced. Most other Tory heavyweights — ex-Thatcher cabinet ministers like Lord Hurd and Sir Malcolm Rifkind — are more straightforward: They're agin the war. They'd have no time for his frightful American clothes or his ghastly hamburger diet, but, social distaste aside, they're Michael Moore Conservatives.
The Conservatives aren't really any less pro-EU either. About the only thing in their favor is that they don't have Labor's cast of leftoid knuckle draggers shambling about out of the public eye.