When I first lived in Britain, in the 1980s, it was the most polarized place I have ever experienced. The two dominant political parties did not just have widely divergent ideologies, one devoted entirely to the raw and naked market and the other to the total and all-encompassing state, but it was as if the Tories and Labour were separate races – each with its own wardrobe, accent, album chart and hairstyle. They were Morlocks and Eloi.
This weekend, as those two major parties stare at one another across an abyss of unfinished democracy, waiting to see whose punishingly small minority will be turned into a jerry-built government through a complex seduction of the third-place Liberal Democrats, we seem to be experiencing the end of the 20-year compromise that put the tribalism into the background and turned Britain into quite a different place.
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