them were only settled in the past hundred and fifty years they don't have a deeply embedded history. There's simply no equivalent places in the UK with any political traction, and that's why the likes of dear Nadine are banging their heads futilely: the only places where that degree of religious and cultural conservatism are electorally significant are a handful of heavily Muslim seats, but in those the Tories will never get elected. Elsewhere, their brand of know-nothing anti-intellectualism (well, experts may say that, but we know better with our common sense!) doesn't play remotely as well as it does in cattle country, while (Scopes onward) the US has a far larger skein of anti-intellectualism than this country does. Cameron, you'll notice, doesn't have to play at being the man of the people in the manner that Bush did: a lot of voters, of all political hues, rather like the idea that British Prime Ministers should be clever people with proper educations, and although there have been a few PMs without degrees from good universities (Major, for example) they have by and large aspired to be seen as intellectuals, rather than yaw-shucks'd there way into office. Plenty of front-benchers are proud of their PhDs, few have less than an excellent first degree and no-one is pretending to be stupid. Nadine's read a book on US politics and assumes that there's a huge untapped "values" vote in the UK, distrusting of education, distrusting of evidence, keen to impose its values on