For all the noise Lazs makes about the irrelevance non american opinions, he certainly expends enough energy on trolling them. Keep trying Lazs; like the old analogy about the monkey and the typewiter, if you keep going long enough you'll make sense eventually.
Toad, the fact of the matter is that there is so little difference between the major parties these days that people have to basically make stuff up (or parrot the media's half truths) in order to frame an argument. Any real ideological basis to british politics passed away with the end of Thatcher's career and the death of John Smith. All that is left is a tussle to see which bunch of petty middle manager types get to occupy the middle ground and pretend to run the country for the next five years. The sad fact is that Blair is more photogenic than Howard and for all his charm Kennedy is a ginger scotsman and this will probably make more difference than any stated policy.
As for Blair being Bush's poodle; that might be a perception shared by many, but what the mindless majority in this increasingly benighted nation don't seem to grasp is this: Howard, or Kennedy, or any other alternative occupant of no. 10 Downing Street would have behaved in exactly the same way as Blair over Iraq and that to do so was in the strategic interests of this country. Blair, or Major before him, would have gone into Iraq with guns blazing 5 or ten years ago if Clinton could have come up with a good enough pretext.
