The Guardian gets off its back

Freed of the commercial imperative to whore for state advertising, The Guardian is showing signs of becoming a newspaper worth reading after a generation of increasingly threadbare 60s leftyism.

This paradigm shift has been forced on me by the discovery that the Guardianistas are capable of writing thoughtful stuff. Today's column by Martin Kettle is a case in point.

Friend and foe will present the Osborne budget as the start of a new tough era. The truth is that it will provide few long-term balanced solutions to any of the big strategic questions that no political tradition in Britain seems capable of confronting with candour.

Find me a democracy where any such political tradition has ever prospered. The British electorate does not, and will never, accept that it gets the governments it deserves because, as P. J. O'Rourke pointed long ago in Parliament of Whores: 'The trouble is, in a democracy, the whores are us.'