[Cohaagen]

People care enormously about politics in the UK, but they rarely realise that the issues which they feel strongly about are in fact "political" as such.

I am glad that the UK - despite the fact that it's a closed-down, CCTV-ridden, sanctimonious, servile, drunken, has-been supplicant nation that trades on rapidly-fading past glories - doesn't have a political scene like the US.

Frankly, I'm glad that we don't suffer from that repellent "conservative vs. liberal" divide than runs through America like a Grand Canyon full of rancid pus. I'm also grateful we don't have millions of people (even teenagers) self-identifying as either one and thereby being inducted into party political trench warfare where opposing sides actually hate their opposite numbers. It's great that we don't fill up terabytes of the internet throwing dog**** at each other and shrieking about "****ing reactionary wingnuts" and "goddamn liberal pinko commie faggots". I sometimes wonder if people will wake up one day and have spontaneous realisation of how bogus and contrived it all is.

One of the worst things Tony Blair did, in ten years and countless multitudes of bad decisions, was to Americanise the post of Prime Minister. That is one thing we don't want to import from the US.


EDIT: Incidentally, on the subject of guns et al - there is the English 1689 Bill of Rights, which guarantees that all Protestants shall have the right to keep arms for self-defence.