When Britain’s Conservative government announced its budget on October 29, the Labour Opposition showed its authentic colors: colors that are now, after a couple of decades of social democracy, the deepest red of socialism. A moderate budget that gave a small tax cut to all workers was denounced as favoring the rich (which of course it does, as well as favoring the poor); a rise in the minimum wage was rejected as inadequate, as were changes to housing policy geared towards improving the supply of cheap homes for first-time buyers; and Labour simply ignored the uncomfortable facts that more people are working in Britain than ever before—unemployment is at a forty-year low—and growth is predicted to rise next year. As in every advanced Western society, a minority of people in Britain are poor, and members of certain minorities occasionally find it harder to obtain their due than some who are indigenous or more integrated. Labour’s approach is to contend that these people are overwhelming in numbers (they are not), huddled masses in need of protection (ditto), and even on the verge of uprising in disgust at their treatment. Any future success for Labour depends on the party’s executing the confidence trick on the British electorate that is required to make them believe Labour’s distorted reality is actually real. What the Conservatives are bad at articulating is that this would entail the most massive assertion of state power seen in Britain since 1945, without a destructive war to excuse