Conservatives

While watching tonight's news we saw conservative candidate David Cameron and a colleague touring schools and doing other stumping. He was talking about shifting taxes from personal incomes and other goods to things like polluters and carbon emitters - bads. I was shocked. This is tax shifting, an idea I'd read among American progressives over a decade ago: instead of taxing things we want to encourage, we should consider taxing things we want to discourage. Cameron also talked about working with at-risk children to help prevent poverty. Excuse me? Focusing on preventing social ills at their roots, instead of waiting to punish offenders much later? Apparently Conservatives here aren't even promising to cut taxes because they don't want to risk lowering public services.

And this really messes with my head: the Conservative Party's new logo is a green tree. All the parties get the environment here. Everyone acknowledges climate change as a serious issue. The Tories, Labour, the Liberal Democrats, and the Green Party are all vying to out-green each other.

I remarked to Margo tonight that I have a hard time telling the parties apart here, though I probably could if I paid more attention to economic policies.

But it's so inspiring to me all the same when even the conservatives here look awfully liberal from the viewpoint of the States. And there's also none of that Biblical weirdness that's so common in the American right. This is a bit surprising given that religion here is State-sponsored; many schools are run by the Church of England, and religious education is mandatory, although it appears to be a comparative religion class, from what we've read of Sarah's curriculum, so it's much more tolerant. So you might expect even more talk of God and Jesus in politics, but we don't see any.

We also haven't seen any mud-slinging. Tony Blair is about to step down and, even though his own party has given him lots of opposition, it's been very civil.