I'm not English, but given the way this country is going, there are many days when I'd like to be. Anyway, with the Brits preparing to decide Tony Blair's fate in a few weeks, there's a quiz where you can determine who you'd vote for.

Who should I vote for?

Your expected outcome:

Liberal Democrat

Your actual outcome:

Labour -3
Conservative -29
	Liberal Democrat 44
UK Independence Party -3
	Green 14

"You should vote: Liberal Democrat"

"The LibDems take a strong stand against tax cuts and a strong one in favour of public services: they would make long-term residential care for the elderly free across the UK, and scrap university tuition fees. They are in favour of a ban on smoking in public places, but would relax laws on cannabis. They propose to change vehicle taxation to be based on usage rather than ownership."

"Take the test at Who Should You Vote For"

Now there were some issues in there--transportation taxation and such--that I claimed neutrality on. My lack of Englishness leaves me unfamiliar with the particulars of those issues, so I might be more Tory or more Labour than the poll suggests.

Matt Yglesias pointed me to the poll. Within the post he also makes the argument that the invasion of Iraq, while not in the U.S.'s interests, was in the interests of Britain. It's an interesting notion. My trouble with it is that I'm not sure what British interest the Iraq invasion served exactly. Absent the U.S., I doubt the British would have tried to summon up a coalition of the willing to strike Iraq, so I suppose the answer is the maintenance of political intimacy with the U.S. My question is whether the Iraq invasion actually served that goal, or whether the concordance of Tony Blair with George W. Bush (a man widely despised in England--a charm of the country surpassed only by its red omnibuses) was enough to make the British public question the wisdom of the "special relationship". Clearly the Brits are unhappy with the idea of being Bush's, or America's, poodle. If the French and Germans can walk away from the U.S., why not the U.K.? Surely that's a question the voters of Britain will be asking, not only over the next few weeks, but also over the next few years. Should the Brits decide to blow us off, or at least, side more with the Continent than with us, it wouldn't be the first time that a politician's policies did the opposite of what he wanted.

What makes all of this sad for Tony Blair is that the reaction of the British public was easy to predict. The British public was against the invasion long before U.S. voters started to notice its stench. I'll never forget the scene where Tony Blair got the slow clap, a devastating signal of contempt, from some middle aged housewives after a television Q&A on Iraq. Still, he never listened to his electorate. Instead, he swallowed every morsel of Bush's nonsense, passed the lies unmediated to the British public, and committed his country to a failure. He'll probably eke out a victory on May 5th, but it will be with a greatly reduced margin in the House. His party will blame him, as they should; and Gordon Brown will become Prime Minister sometime in 2006. How might Mencken have put it? "He came into life a hero, a Galahad, in bright and shining armor. He was passing out a poor mountebank."