Hello and welcome to the political orphanage, a home for plucky misfits and problem solvers.

I'm your host, Andrew Heaton.

Last week, the United Kingdom held parliamentary elections

in which the nation's conservative party got boot kicked and its labor party

became swollen and engorged with victory.

Meanwhile, the Lib Dems crept back to their pre-disaster levels to become the nation's definitive

and even functional third party, while the Scottish National Party imploded and retreated north of Baric-upon Tweed.

There's a lot of different angles we could take on today's program.

What will the new labor government do in or to Great Britain and how hard will it do it.

We all predicted that the Tories were going to lose the election but why did they lose

so bad?

But what I'm interested in today is what this particular election says about the realignment of British politics.

Here's what I mean.

When I was a kid, the Republican Party in the United States was the coalition of Mr Burns, Dr Hibbert, and a televangelist.

Whereas the Democratic Party was the party of Joe Quimby and a crooked union.

But today, those two large parties have reconstituted to a great

extent where the GOP is becoming the Dive Bar Party and the Democrats are becoming the managerial party. So similarly, what's

happening in Britain is the labor victory that we just witnessed, merely the pendulum swinging back after 14 years of

Tory rule, or is something more tectonic and foundational occurring.

I will argue the latter, and I will test that hypothesis out with two different guests

over the course of today's program.

Now the political orphanage has an international audience,

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