Garton-ass (as Tim Worstall puts it) follows Gordon (see below post) in laying out the case for voting Labour to usher in a new- but strange, apparently- Liberal Britain.

As Tim points out this is rubbish masquerading as history. As I recall it from me history classes, the days of Liberals versus Conservatives were the days when a sensible, if often unacceptably languid, debate was had between the State not doing something, and the State doing something- all at a time when it was much harder for the state to wield any kind of apparata whatsoever.

These days it's dead easy for the Government to 'do something': it's call fiddling with absurdly complex and deliberately managerial taxation, and pumping it into artificially lowering unemployment by creating such various bodkins as 'classroom assistants' (nice though they naturally are) and the like.

Anyhow, What Blair definitely isn't is a classical Liberal- and the same almost goes without saying for Charles Kennedy. What the strange new birth might be, in fact, is a nation of state-fed puddings- stodgy, doughy, fatty and stupid.