If you’re a middle-class American voter, you should probably be aware that your president has just imposed the largest middle-class pay cut in history, by slashing semi-skilled employees and junior managers’ right to paid overtime. Yup, that’s the same president whose tax cuts also imposed the largest pay rise in history for the extremely rich…

Tony Blair can be distasteful, but I think people on the British centre and left sometimes forget the genuine improvements in social equality and poverty reduction that have been made since 1997 (the number of people sleeping on the streets of London is down to double figures, just as a random example). Albeit quietly, Labour is working – it’s pulling off the balancing act between market-led economic growth and egalitarian intervention with greater success than any British government in the last 50 years. Meanwhile, the Bush administration leadership is turning the USA into a banana republic.

Clearly, if you want to preserve a capitalist democracy, you should put the socialists in charge…