Ross has written about the real possibility that we’ll see a hung Parliament after the next election. What voters need to understand is that Britain has been enduring a deeply divided coalition government for at least the last five years, as the conflict between Blairites and Brownites has intensified, and as proxy wars have broken out over the succession. A hung Parliament is a virtual guarantee of yet another election within the year.

Josh Barro has written an excellent piece on public sector wage freezes in Britain, a policy that we urgently need to adopt.

James Forsyth, one of the best political journalists in the English-speaking world, is the indispensable man when it comes to covering the election. Here he explains how the Conservatives can burst the Lib Dem bubble.

Because Ross is a servant of the truth more than a dude who is hellbent on scoring partisan points, he wrote the following:

Even if they manage to pull out a win, the Tories will have to actually execute the transformation that they’ve promised. Here the American experience is not encouraging. From Richard Nixon to Ronald Reagan to George W. Bush, almost every modern Republican president has pledged to decentralize government and empower local communities. But their successes have tended to be partial, and their failures glaring. Cameron’s decentralizing vision is much better thought out than Nixon’s “new federalism” or Bush’s promise of an “ownership society.” But it’s easy to imagine it meeting the same unhappy fate.

Matt Yglesias responds:

It seems to me that this is a topic worth exploring. Why is it that the slogan of decentralized government and empowered local communities has, despite its appeal, consistently failed to deliver on its alleged promise? Or alternatively, why is it that despite the repeated failures of this decentralization agenda that conservatives keep on pushing it? I think the political right raises a lot of good and important points about the limited efficacy of the public sector. But what’s needed is some kind of real effort to address and remediate these problems. In America, the right tends instead to simply revel in them, or else to put forward warmed-over versions of ideas that, as Douthat says, don’t actually work.

But Matt knows that there’s a great deal going on here, e.g., the British have a far more centralized system and so a prime minister has fairly wide scope for pursuing drastic policy changes. Michael Howard, for example, was able to launch a policy revolution as Home Secretary that would be unimaginable for a federal cabinet member in the U.S. Yes, there are entrenched pockets in the civil service that make sweeping administrative reform difficult. But, as liberals understand, there are many more “veto points” in our system.

This doesn’t mean that the Cameron project — Ross referenced Alex Massie’s excellent “Tocquevillian Tories” coinage — will succeed. Much depends on whether the parents, public sector workers, community groups, small business, etc., that the decentralization agenda aims to engage and mobilize actually seizes the initiative. And then there’s the thornier question of how these goals can be pursued through a highly risk-averse bureaucracy and political culture that is very averse to surrendering power for fear that it isn’t also shedding accountability for failure.

To Matt’s point, one way to address and remediate the limited efficacy of our public sector is to limit its functions, so that we can focus on doing a few jobs very well.