There are still those who would like to pretend that a Tory administration would be so much worse than New Labour, so that deigning to vote for anyone else would be an "indulgence". Choosing "the least worst" is not making this particular choice, it is also choosing a system which forces you to accept the least worst as the best you can hope for. Naturally, the defenders of the dictatorship of the elite pretend - perhaps they even deceive themselves - that the particular slew of lies, compromise and smarm they are hawking is "only temporary"; that, at some unspecified time in the future, things will improve if we only support the "progressive" wing of the status quo. But Hobson's choice is no choice, and the delusion of progressivism is not a psychological quirk, it is the structural delusion upon which liberal democracy is based.

[...] In the pre-Thatcher 1970s, it took six carworkers to do the job of one; in the post-Thatcher Noughties, it takes six consultants to do the job of none (since the mission statement wasn't worth writing in the first place). Same decadence, diffferent beneficiaries. [...]