Brett McS said in the comments of a different post,

The Tories are against British involvement in Iraq? Bizzaro. In that case, I would say that they’ve been well and truly “triangulated”.

Hah! This is trigonometry of an entirely different level than simple triangulation.

The Australian – Tories go populist: Britain’s Conservative Party has rushed to the Centre, thereby surrendering in the battle of ideas, writes Europe correspondent Peter Wilson

Abandoning the stringent, small-government creed of Toryism that Margaret Thatcher launched in the 1970s, Cameron, 39, has rejected the keep-the-faith strategy of the four Tory leaders who followed Thatcher and instead has accepted the basic parameters of Blairism, a centrist style of government built on fiscal restraint, strong spending on public services and liberal social policies.

The result is that after more than a decade of making a lonely and unpopular stand on the Right of the political spectrum, the Tories have rushed to the Centre ground, which is now more crowded than it has been for a half-century. Cameron’s success has rattled the Liberal Democrats, the centrist third party that long ago drifted to the Left of Blair on issues such as civil rights, the Iraq war, taxation, public spending and the environment. …

This means that having once offered the broadest political spectrum in the English-speaking world and one of the broadest in the developed world, Britain’s three mainstream parties now make up one of the most narrow political scenes in the world.

The lip, it quivers.

His economic spokesman, Oliver Letwin, has even declared that a new aim of Conservative policy is to narrow the gap between rich and poor: not just to make everybody richer but to reduce the Blair era wealth gap to produce a more equal society.

Oh gawd.

Date: Mar 9th, 2006 · Comments RSS · Tags: Politics