McG, you've got a government like Thatcher's , or didn't you notice? I'd have thought Blair's pre ('97) election tryst with Murdoch to get the Sun on board, and making Thatcher his first guest at No 10, were pretty strong signals by any reckoning.

Sticking to the Tory spending program (which the outgoing chancellor Ken Clark admitted even the the Tories would not have done); presiding over an ever-widening gap between rich and poor (the corollary of which is spectacular growth in the prison population - and how wasteful is that?), and the insistance on regressive taxation (ie taxing spending rather than income) are surely conclusive.

Blair has sussed that if he keeps 35-40 per cent of the voting public feeling good, he's safe, and sod the rest. The man has not an ounce of social conscience in him. My guess is that he chose Labour, and stuck with it through the SDP fracture, for much the same reason Hitler chose the National Socialists. The party machine was in a state of collapse. Membership records were in such chaos that a crook like Maxwell could blithely lie that he'd been a member for years, and thereby become a Labour MP. Labour was wide open to manipulation by anyone of self-serving bent, and Blair exploited that weakness to the hilt.

alanabit, regardless of whether you like your politics to be entertaining, democracy would be better served if politics reached just a few of the millions who have given up playing any part in it.
People can hardly be blamed for scorning their entitlement to vote when the only issue is which party would make better managers of our conservative, unmixed, divisive economy.