Interesting insight to how some voters on the left and centre felt about the parties and their policies. Case study that the great hope of today is the low despair of tomorrow.

I met people that left the Labour party with the first six months because it had sold out! It also reveals that many activists would prefer to be right rather then in power. Meeting activists when their party fails I hear too often that the electorate was fooled or bribed rather then that they had failed to articulate the current experience of people into a vision build on the political values of fairness or choice etc.

Its central weakness for me (and as it was never an intention of the book, unfair for me to say)is that it does not address the reality and the policy options that this creates. Yes you could nationalise the top 100 companies but what would be the impact of this? Yes you could decide to break up the NHS monopoly and gave vouchers to put the power back into the hands of the purchaser but...

I wish we could more grown up discussion of the choices and implications of why PFI rather then direct provision( is it about the national expenditure record, this is not seen as public so the ratio of expenditure to income looks better and so the national economy looks better and so voters fell better. And 25 years means jam now and tears for someone else later)

I have only seen this grown up approach once in recent times on British TV. On NEWSNIGHT (A daily serious current affairs programme on BBC2) to explore the factors behind reviving nuclear power, they assembled the ministers and and the whole range of groups who in an affect gave individual and conflicting policy briefs so that you the audience saw how the ministers tried to make sense of issues that you also struggled to make sense of. ( )