He's not from Brighton

When we read Andrew Sullivan on Friday grappling with a dialectic of agreement with and dislike of National Review writer John Derbyshire by saying "Maybe it's our common English roots (although I have a very hefty dose of Irish genes)" we realised that at some point we need to formally outline our Iron Law of Sully which is that he invokes his Irish ancestry when he's feeling alienated from his American conservative friends. We also planned on digging up an old link where we had made this observation but then the fine people at Sullywatch did it for us. So just a couple of things to add.

There's a corollary to the above law which is that his self-identification as an English Tory also ratchets up at these crises of faith -- not withstanding his sharp reaction when his American critics bring up his English background. Sometimes he's explicit about this as in his blitz of UK election posting, and sometimes subtle, such as an approving reference to Lord Palmerston that we noted a while back.

Now in fairness, he's correct that British conservatives do depart from their contemporary American namesakes on moral issues. But there's another important factor that he could have used the London Times article to which he linked as a hook to explore -- but didn't, so we'll do instead. The writer Matthew Parris (a pal of Sully's) joins a couple of Tory candidates on the campaign trail in Sussex: Nick Boles, the gay pal of Sully's running in Hove, and Nick Herbert, not known to be a pal of Sully's, running in Arundel & South Downs (Parris gets the two constituencies mixed up at the start of the article).

The latter Nick is only there because Tory leader Michael Howard canned the incumbent MP Howard Flight for telling an off-the-record meeting that the Tories had secret plans to slash government spending far more than they were saying on the campaign trail. Which gets to the core of what we think is Labour's biggest success over the last decade: their ability to convert any debate about the level of taxes into a debate about the level of public spending. This has reached the point where a tax-cut promise is almost a liability, because Labour have convinced enough people that any such cut must imply a reduction in public services.

The contrast with the US could not be starker -- Democratic candidates continually find themselves running against Republicans offering free tax cuts, with no day of reckoning on when public spending will have to adjust. One rhetorical crock after another -- Laffer curves, elimination of "waste, fraud, and abuse," "deficits don't matter," gets trotted out, and the moral values voters buy it. We don't know whether this reflects more rational voters, or less margin for massive public borrowing, but Howard Flight's sin was to air the downside of tax cuts within this constraint. Just too easy for Labour to exploit, hence the arrival of Nick #2.

So yes, the conservative voters on the Sussex doorsteps don't mind if one of the Nicks is gay. It would be Bush/DeLay style economics that they can't stand.