Striving Against Opposition

British Politics

There is an election heating up in the UK, I can't claim to be more than an occasional and casual observer of British politics but there are few elections which really strike me as presenting two political options as utterly lacking as the current elections in the UK. I can't really claim to have a horse in that particular race. In one corner we have Tony Blair's Labour Party, or "new Labour", and by "new" it seems to mean "a reasonable foreign policy but with the same great big government taste", and Blair seems to be working to get Britain more deeply involved in the European Union. My general opinion is that the European Union has generally been good for one country, France, Britain has never benifeted fiscally from participating in the European Union. its simply a bad arrangement which Thatcher fought tooth and nail. I'd hate to see the UK the craddle of modern democracy pass that utterly wretched socialist constitution the EU has cooked up.

Labour has been engaged in all sorts of rampant stupidity in the UK, they've been introducing hate speach legislation to stiffle emerging criticism against muslims in Britain. Although apparantly Mr.Bean has lead the charge to at least soften that blow. The irony of Rowan Atkinson's whose character didn't speak in so many episodes of that show, becoming the champion of free speach is nearly overwhelming. But the fact its left to a comedian to champion the cause of free speach is a sad indictment of the political process in the UK to begin with.

Labour has apparantly also backed down on prosecuting people for shooting intruders who broke into their house in the middle of the night and had weapons/were threatening. Despite the fact that their opponents have been laying into them about it for a year about that, only recently did they decide they really hadn't meant for that ever to be illegal at all....

They also outlawed the fox hunt? What's up with that? What are stuffy old english families in the country side going to chase after on horseback with guns now? But in all seriousness doesn't the left have any respect for tradition and customs? (apparantly property rights and free speach are tolerated only when election time rolls around) Britain also has a terribly extensive system of cameras monitoring public places. Generally Labour's domestic policies are agregious leftist pap which treads all over individual rights and hasn't much use for logic or reason.

They finally seem to have acted on solving the longstanding immigration problem but Tony seems a bit miffed that the British Conservatives stole his thunder by producing their solution last week.

When you come right down to it, I would have no time for Tony Blair and his Labour party of big government socialists, if it were not for the fact that Blair was rather zealous in fighting the war on terror and supporting efforts to promote democracy in the middle east.

That is a rather substantial redeeming feature for an otherwise useless political party (which doesn't feel terribly comfortable doing the only thing its doing right).

The British Conservatives seem to be genuinely less agregious on all the domest UK fronts, however, they've rather opportunistically lumped themselves in with the pacificist anti-war leftist crowd (decidedly bad company to keep). Evidently their desperate for votes enough to distinguish themselves from Labour on the one thing that party is doing right. Hence the Howard Conservatives may well be a better choice for the UK itself but it would be detrimental to the world were Blair is at least enthusiastically backing democracy and a more muscular foreign policy. Its dissapointing to see Howard turning his back on the rather stellar record that Thatcher and the conservatives in the UK developed during the Cold War. At that time they were the party standing up for freedom and democracy abroad, while Labour lumped itself in with the leftist shrills.

I really wish they could both lose, and some party was running in the UK on Labour's foriegn policy and the Conservatives domestic agenda.

posted by Chris @ 2/08/2005 01:37:00 a.m.