Sometimes an international correspondent - adopting a bird's eye view of things - can remind us of the most important aspects of something like a UK election. Domestic experts can have more knowledge but they get lost in the detail of a situation.
This article* from today's International Herald Tribune contains a number of 'food-for-thought' observations:
The powerful continuation of Tony Blair's 'magpie' phenomenon
"Tony Blair has repositioned the Labour Party as a centrist, catch-all political party," said Anthony King, a professor of government at Essex University. "And one of Michael Howard's difficulties is that neither he nor any Conservative Party figure has a clear perception of precisely what the Conservative Party should stand for. After a decade, the party still has not worked out what it wants to say."
The similarity of Tories and Labour on some big issues
"Irwin Stelzer, a conservative scholar with the Hudson Institute in Washington and a columnist for The Sunday Times of London, said: "There is no reason to vote for the Tories. They're not offering anything different on tax policy. They are not offering anything different on crime policy. What the Tories have been unable to do - partly because Blair has been so successful at stealing their clothes - is to come up with a distinctively different policy."
"Tony Travers, a political analyst at the London School of Economics, noted that Conservatives had proposed shaving just £4 billion off the £450 billion budget proposed by Labour - a difference that The Sun newspaper described as "pathetic." ...When the Tories start acting like Conservatives, they might deserve our support," the paper said."
British politicians don't do religion
"When Howard appeared in the pulpit at the Tabernacle Christian Center on the outskirts of London on Sunday, he did not mention God or religion once in a 20-minute speech, an omission that would have been unthinkable for Bush or John Kerry."
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