So, here we are.

I'm sitting here in the UK typing, while the minutiae of the US Presidential Primaries form the bulk of the broadsheet and non-tabliod TV news stories.

Shurely shome mishtake?

I mean, it's a big story - of course it is. But is it really the sort of story that the British media should be spending quite so much time on? Isn't there something else that could or should be given airtime? I don't know what that something should be, natch - if I did I'd be a news editor, not an armchair grumbler.

I can't help feeling that what's really going on - givne the way that the Democrats have so far dominated the coverage this side of the pond - is some sort of vicarious thrill that the GOP is going to finally "get theirs", as it were. No doubt they are, but I'm not sure the Dems are going to wave any magic wands and make the "liberal intelligentsia" feel all warm and cuddled.

Not least because it ain't the Yanks or the Neocons or any of our cherished lefty bogey-men that's fucking the dearly-held principles of woolly intellectuals like me (you know, like habeus corpus, freedom of information, the right to privacy, rolling back the worst excesses of consumerism rather than extending them into every sector of public life).

Nope. It's our very own Labour government (I draw a distinction between the NuLabs in Westminster and the party, because the party long ceased to have much influence over what happens in Government. We probably had more in Opposition.) that's doing all of that, and the Tories are, at least initially, unlikely to do anything to rock the boat.

Worse, they'll start undoing the few good things Labour has managed to do as soon as they've lulled us into the false sense of security we'll (by then) have, off the back of relief at getting rid of a tired NuLab government. 

They'll want to cut back on "waste", naturally. So bye-bye Arts funding, one of the few things that has kept the middle classes quiet these past 10 years. "Well, the country might be going to shit, but at least we can go and see Sir Iain on the South Bank/go to the National Gallery/etc." 

And the "waste" that's been pissed away on the Public Sector under NuLab (and there has been collossal amounts - not on "poltical correctness" or even on bureaucracy but straight into mostly off-shore company accounts under the banner of PFI) will be cut back. PFI contracts themselves will be untouchable (the fucking bloodsuckers made damn sure of that) so all new investment will be frozen.

Most of the management consultancy drones that are ruining every part of public life vote Tory, or at least they will if they sniff a tax cut on their MBA-bloated salaries, so they won't touch their gravy train. No, it'll be nurses, teachers, and other people likely to vote some way other than Tory that get fucked over, just like it was last time.

Give it a parliamentary term or two, and we'll be right back where we started. The whining classes won't be writing to the Daily Mail to whinge about the postcode lottery in NHS-funded plastic surgery clinics, and at-death's-door people won't be on the teatime news complaining that the NHS won't fund their homeopathic remedy of distilled water with an expensive label, or the experimental cancer drug that hasn't even been cleared for testing on animals yet, or the extra tuition for little Shanxi's recently-diagnosed syndromia madeupica ad explanitium ex being-a-little-shittico et obtainicum-mea-feei.

Nope. We'll be back to the good old days, when public sector complaints were about the rats running around everywhere and the fucking great big holes in the ceiling of the local clinic/classroom/waiting room.

Maybe then we'll be happy - the best bit about being in opposition is you can rant and rave and protest all you like and it doesn't do anything dangerous like change anything.

Then, when you get back into government, you can be utterly timid because you're scared that if you do what you really know you should, something will break.

...

Blimey. That was all over the place. I told you I was rusty...