re: #1 iceweasel

Also, really pleased to see the backs of Clegg, Farage and Milliband.

Damn shame to see Cameron still around— but Labour (and England) have no one but themselves to blame. Even adding all the SNP seats to Labour wouldn’t have stopped the Tories reaching a majority.

Labor lost in large part because it didn’t have that much to offer. Money’s tight for the British government so the kinds of social program expansions that mainstream-left parties like to lead with aren’t all that viable. The major social program people over there seem to worry about, the National Health Service, is the one that David Cameron is very careful not to subject to problematic cutbacks.

Labor was also unwilling to propose not funding the UK’s next generation of ballistic missile submarines (the military abbreviation is SSBN), as was the SNP, simply because its a dangerous world and while an independent Scotland might be able to opt for the quiet life, England is simply too important and too high profile to do so.

The times right now favored the Tories in England and the SNP in Scotland.