ON THE EVE OF BRITISH ELECTIONS: One of my two favorite Brits savages the other. Theodore Dalrymple at City Journal, ever the wet blanket, takes on Tony Blair and, as always, manages to sound depressingly plausible. I have no insight into British domestic political issues. When I visit the country, it appears, on the surface, remarkably prosperous. Blair has been a true friend of America, at great political cost to himself. Has he been a friend to freedom, in his own country? Not if one believes Dalrymple:
From the point of view of civil liberties, Blair's government is the most illiberal in recent British history. It has abolished the legal prohibition of double jeopardy and wants to introduce the preventive detention of people deemed dangerous by doctors but who have never committed an offense. It has recently extended the use of absentee ballots, with the utterly foreseeable result of wholesale electoral fraud - in Labour's favor, of course.
All seem to agree Blair and Labor will win again. Frankly, nothing Dalrymple writes convinces me that would be a bad thing - certainly not from an American perspective, which is, after all, the only perspective I have.
10:39:52 PM 
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