Division time
You have plenty of time before polling in Britain on May 1st to catch up with your general-election reading. Herewith, a guide
A DIVIDE runs through British politics as deep as left-right, and as profound as authoritarian-liberal. On one side of it stand the romantics, who treat politics as a stirring adventure of moral commitments and great public purposes. On the other are the pragmatists, for whom politics is all about swings, seats and opinion polls, about policy detail and interest-group trade-offs, underpinned by a general presumption that the “system” works.
This article appeared in the Culture section of the print edition under the headline “Division time”
From the March 22nd 1997 edition
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