In a way, it led to Barack Obama’s adoption of the Bob the Builder slogan “Yes We Can”. I await Hillary Clinton drawing on ‘Blue Peter’ to back up her claims of experience, by adopting the slogan “You Might Want To Get An Adult To Help You With This Next Part, Because It Could Be Rather Sticky”.

Tory campaign 2005?

Er… didn’t do much for Enoch Powell’s career, IIRC.

In the 2005 general election, the turnout was the second lowest since 1918 – the turnout at the 2001 election having been the lowest since 1918.

In the 2005 election, more didn’t vote than the number who voted for New Labour candidates. Blair could hardly claim an overwhelming mandate despite the historic achievement of a Labour government being re-elected for a third term. In fact, between the 1997 and 2005 elections, Blair lost 4 million votes and half the membership of the Labour Party.

As for stupid, making a general observation, very many people are not clever; some of them are quite stupid, some stupid people are very stupid: but they all get a vote. Or is stupidity to be rendered now as merely ‘differently intelligent’? Note that I make no distinctions of class, nor do I associate intelligence with any particular set of exams or tests, or other specific attainments that might conceal sampling biases. Nevertheless, if very many people were not, in a surprisingly large variety of ways, really quite stupid, public life would not be quite the steaming pile of foetid excrement that it is today. It could be worse, no doubt, but it could be so much better.

Note also the populist left wing message. Government is giving out stuff! It just isn’t giving out stuff to you! But it should! Very much the heirs of Mussolini.

” . . Il Cavaliere—as Berlusconi is known—has never managed to shake off the stigma among his European counterparts of being a leader who is not to be taken seriously. Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair was the only one who really bothered with Berlusconi: Blair visited Berlusconi in Sardinia and the two leaders were united in supporting the Iraq war.”
http://www.spiegel.de/international/europe/0,1518,548749,00.html

But then Tony Blair, like Mussolini, was committed to the third way.

Martin Clark is an academic historian. In his book on: Modern Italy 1871-1995 (Longman 2nd ed, 1996), p.250, where he writes about the policies of Mussolini’s fascist government: “They seemed to offer ‘a third way’, between capitalism and Bolshevism, which looked attractive in the Depression. …”

It’s astonishing that a granddaughter of Mussolini, openly endorsing her grandfather’s policies, could be a major Italian politician in this day and age. She rather looks like him, too, in a strange way . . .

http://youtube.com/watch?v=yLlloyioRAs&feature=related