THE TERRIFYING PROSPECT THAT THE OTHER SIDE IS MORE POPULAR:

A Tory dystopia looms, yet ministers meekly sit and wait (Jackie Ashley, 9/07/09, The Guardian)

Let me take you by the hand and lead you to a very different Britain, one that's perhaps not more than half a year away. It's a country convulsed over its future in the European Union, one in which welfare is being slashed and new prisons are the only public investment still growing. Bodies set up to make life fairer and safer are disappearing in a "bonfire of the quangos".

The BBC is being dismantled and a Fox News-style Murdoch broadcasting agenda is ripping ahead. A rightwing Conservative parliamentary party is in power and sees little chance of opposition for a decade. Labour is a shattered shell of a party – nobody cares about who becomes its leader – and the future of opposition politics seems to lie with the Lib Dems.

Much of this will be, at least for a while, very popular.

Ah, there's the rub... When Labour rid itself of Tony Blair it ceded the Third Way back to the Tories.

Posted by Orrin Judd at September 7, 2009 6:52 AM