I realize that following British politics beyond a certain point is a signal of a life poorly led. It’s like if you knew not only all the players in the National Hockey League, even the Estonians, even the ones who play in outposts like Florida, but also if you knew all the up-and-coming stars of the Ontario Junior Hockey League. It’s a sign that you ought to be using some of that time reading Proust or catching up The Jersey Shore or something to round you out. Still, I like to follow what’s going on in the UK because it’s like a bizarro version of the United States: we’re so similar, yet so very different, while at the same time being inextricably bound to one another via the Beatles, James Bond, and the prevalence of British actors on our prime time TV Screens.

On Thursday, Britain will vote for a new Parliament. Three parties are contending–Labor, Conservative, and Liberal Democrat. The leader of the party that gets the most seats will become Prime Minister, and if there is no clear majority, two of the parties will have form a coalition and govern together. Until Prime Minister Gordon Brown self-destructed last week, the three parties were neck-and-neck. Now the Conservatives, led by David Cameron, have pulled ahead.

One of the interesting effects of this campaign has been to spotlight how by modern standards the British parliament is so undemocratic. For one thing, all this electoral activity has been focused on the House of Commons, but there is also the House of Lords. The vast majority of its 733 members (87 more than the House of Commons) are appointed, except for those whose title in inherited, meaning they themselves have not necessarily done anything meritorious, but were just luckily descended from useful ancestors. The House of Lords is home to a number of dedicated people who make useful contributions to public life, but isn’t it odd that it the worlds oldest democracy, a house of parliament that controls legislation is never answerable to the public?

Even more weird is winner-take-all system that prevails in parliamentary districts. Called there `first past the post,’ it means very simply that the candidate with the most votes wins. That seems simple enough and reasonably fair, until one realizes that in Britain, this fair-seeming system is actually quit unfair. According to the BBC, if each of the major parties gained 30% of the vote, under the UK’s grossly-distorted system, the Labor party would get 315 MPs, the Conservatives 206 and the Liberal Democrats only 100. Writing in The Guardian last week, elections expert Edward McMillan-Scott referred to the UN guidelines for fair elections, which holds that “The will of the people of a country is the basis for the authority of government, and that will must be determined through genuine periodic elections, which guarantee the right and opportunity to vote freely and to be elected fairly through universal and equal suffrage.” On that basis, says McMillan-Scott,“I would contend that no stretch of the rules could find our electoral system “fair”.”

Pretty embarrassing thing to say about a country that boasts the Magna Carta and the mother of all Parliaments. But when you throw in the fact that there is no written Constitution and no written Bill of Rights and a party system that insists on discipline, and you realize that Britain has an antiquated structure that is wildly out of step with 21st century notions of democratic government. Pretty bizarre.

Thank goodness Coldplay, Daniel Craig and Hugh Laurie are still upholding their part of the bargain.

(Should you be interested, you can see for yourself if Thursday’s raw vote for each party yields a proportional number of seats in Parliament, or whow wildly off it is, by going to the BBC’s vote calculator, here.)

Does anyone else see the irony in the head of the world’s largest surveillance state meeting his destruction in front of an open mic?

Let’s face it, for all the commentary about how Gordon Brown’s harsh comments about a 65 year-old housewife revealed the inner man, what he was mostly guilty of was venting. Struggling through a difficult campaign, going through the motions of public appearances that he didn’t think were going well, Gordon Brown vented. He did what people do after dinners with prickly in-laws and long, droning meetings with the boss—he let off steam.

Now venting, like farting, belching, scratching your butt, and wishing someone were dead, are unpleasant and unattractive human activities that most people perform at least periodically, even though they seldom reflect advantageously on the performer. But usually they are performed before a privileged audience in a place that is private, a status that Brown, sitting inside his car in the company of a handful of loyal aides, thought he enjoyed. But Brown had forgotten that he was wearing an open microphone put there by the TV news people filming his campaign stop, and his comments were shared with the world. What distinguished this incident from a garden variety event like Christian Bale going ballistic on a soundstage is that Brown is not merely a world leader, he’s the leader of the country that is the foremost surveillance state in the world.

There are 4.2 million closed-circuit television (CCTV) cameras in the UK, one for every fourteen people, perhaps a million in London alone. The cameras are operated by the police and by governmental authorities like the London Underground, by private security firms and local governments, by schools and hospitals and parking lots and chip shops and pubs. In some parts of London, like Westminister, where Parliament and the government buildings are collected, they are literally everywhere, gray boxy sentinels as expressionless as the guards in front of Buckingham Palace. But there are plenty in residential neighborhoods as well. Within 200 yards of a particular vantage point on quiet Canonbury Square in gentrified Islington, one can find 32 cameras running 24 hours a day, and the only thing that makes that particular vantage point unusual was that in 1944, it was the place where George Orwell was living when he began writing 1984.

And thanks to Brown’s Labor government, more cameras are on their way, only they will be more capable. Testing has begun on cameras that will incorporate software that will evaluate your face and eavesdrop on your conversations and tell you to pick up the empty coffee cup you’ve just tossed. If we think public officials are too cocooned now, imagine what they’ll be like when they risk becoming global laughingstocks every time they fail to dispose of a candy wrapper in a proper bin. Yet what’s astonishing is how ineffective CCTV is in fighting crime. A report by London’s Metropolitan Police that was released last August stated that “for every 1,000 cameras in London, less than one crime is solved per year,’’ putting the cost of that particular act of justice at a not very efficient 20,000 pounds. Perhaps one reason is that is that the cameras have been set up on an ad hoc basis dating back to the Thatcher regime, and are not linked. This means that although a Londoner might be caught by a video camera as often as 300 times a day, the fact that those cameras are not connected to one another means that the spectacular feats of surveillance people see television cops perform with ease are simply impossible. Retroactively the police might be able to follow a criminal every step of the way from his home to the scene of the crime, but it’s not as though cops can follow a suspect through central London. Last year an amused security official of the London Underground told me about the time the TV series “Spooks’’ filmed in the Whitehall station. “The character went into our security booth and connected our camera system to MI-5. We’re not connected to MI-5.’’

Instead, the cameras catch people in the act of performing the kind of infraction that Gordon Brown committed—things that are embarrassing, things that should be ignored that instead cause tons of explanation, things that everybody does. Everyone in London seems to have heard a story like the one about the university security sweep that was aimed against car thieves but instead caught two faculty members snogging in the back seat of a sedan. That was an accidental discovery, but as it turns out, local governments, armed with souped-up surveillance capabilities invested in them with new anti-terror laws, have been targeting people suspected of littering, fishing illegally, dumping, and applying to a school outside their area of eligibility. Seeking al-qaeda, we found cow-tippers. Last January, documents were revealed that suggested that the South Coast partnership, a cooperative venture between the Kent Police and the Home Office, was planning to use unmanned spy drones of the type employed in Afghanistan, in policing the population. Hey, it’s not a black helicopter, but it’s close.

And CCTV is just the beginning; British civil libertarians have been fighting other recent Labor Party initiatives include the institution of a biometric national ID card, the creation of a national DNA database, fitting all cars with tracking devices, and instituting systems for tracking all e-mails, phone calls and internet use. The glib line often cited to justify these measures is “If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear.’’ But everybody’s got something to hide. If you don’t believe me, ask Gordon Brown.

Seldom is one treated to the complete implosion of a major public figure, but earlier today we were presented with the scene of the Prime Minister of Great Britain, Gordon Brown, the man who, amid the heat of 2008 financial crisis, was credited by the not-easily-impressed Paul Krugman with “saving the world,” collapsing into a heap of ruination. What’s more, we got to see him watch it. Brown, campaigning for reelection, was filmed in a routine chat with a voter, a 65 year old woman named Gillian Duffy . She talked about her loyalty to the Labor Party, and offered a concern or two, especially about immigration. The encounter seemed to have passed pleasantly enough, but when Brown climbed back into his limo, he fumed. Not realizing that he was still wearing an open mike, he called the encounter “a disaster,” and sought to identify the aide who had made the meeting possible. Asked by an aide what Duffy had said, Brown replied: “Oh everything, she was just a sort of bigoted woman. She said she used to be Labour. I mean it’s just ridiculous.” Before long, Brown appeared on a radio program whose host played the encounter. Video cameras captured Brown’s utter mortification.

It would have been painful for any politician to have committed this blunder, but in Brown’s case, it is likely to be fatal. In the candidates’ debates that have aired over the last couple weeks, Brown has seemed off-balance, always a little too eager, or too forceful, or too something. Put under the microscope, he was failing to measure up. This underscored a sense that people had about him that there is something false about him. Brown has a bit of Richard Nixon in him, and it’s not just the jowls; he never seems to be comfortable around people. What this Gillian Duffy moment shows is that in this simple encounter, he wasn’t listening to her or paying attention to her, but was entirely misreading her. Fairly heartbreaking is the footage of Ms. Duffy being informed of the Prime Minister’s private comments; what had been a special moment that had elevated her now turned into an embarrassment. The image is devastating. A week before the election, the voters saw the prime minister express his unvarnished contempt for a woman who was everyone’s wife, everyone’s mum, everyone’s auntie. He’s toast.

Sorry to be so late to the party, but I was reading something the other day that placed Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell’s discussion of slavery and Virginia and the Civil War of a couple of weeks ago in particularly sharp relief. You’ll recall that as a sop to the Sons of Confederate War Veterans, McDonnell proclaimed April Confederate History Month, seizing an opportunity to appease some lost-in-the-past cavaliers that his two immediate predecessors had let go unavailing. In fairness, McConnell’s actual proclamation was fairly tempered, calling upon “all Virginians” to “reflect upon our Commonwealth’s shared history, to understand the sacrifices of the Confederate leaders, soldiers and citizens during the period of the Civil War, and to recognize how our history has led to our present.” Says the proclamation, “this defining chapter in Virginia’s history should not be forgotten, but instead should be studied, understood and remembered by all Virginians, both in the context of the time in which it took place, but also in the context of the time in which we live.”

McDonnell must have thought that he had pulled off quite a fast one: the Lost Causers got their proclamation, and all McDonnell had to say was that he urged people to study and reflect. No tributes to famous traitors like Lee and Jackson, no exaltations about the confederate army’s talent for carnage, no gee whizzy moments about how close they came to victory: just study and reflection. But those who resent the pernicious nostalgia of the whole Sons of the Confederate Veterans thing were shrewd enough to give him his study and reflection, and instead asked him “Okay, Bobwhat about slavery?”

And here, Bob stumbled. Instead of saying “Look, it would have been massively self-defeating if not simply impolite to bring up the great moral evil of slavery in the midst of my self-serving sop to these dead-enders, but if you, in the course of your reflection and study, wish to draw a connection between these fighting men and the corrupt institutions they served, well, be my guest,” McDonnell said “There were any number of aspects to that conflict between the states. Obviously, it involved slavery. It involved other issues. But I focused on the ones I thought were most significant for Virginia.”

As it happened, not long after McDonnell uttered these maladroit comments, I was reading The Battle Cry of Freedom, James M. McPherson’s brilliant history of the war. As he reports, Virginia seceded when a convention adopted a resolution supporting secession by a vote of in April 1861 by a vote of 88 to 55. As it turns out, the median number of slaves owned by delegates supporting secession was 11.5; the median number owned by delegates opposing secession was 4. Fifty-three of the delegates supporting secession came from counties where the number of slaves was greater than 25% of the population–big slave-holding regions, in other words. In a popular vote that ratified the convention’s recommendation, in the 35 counties where the slave population was less than 2.5%, voters rejected secession–from the United States, that is. In fact, these counties ended up seceding from Virginia. They formed their own state, and joined the Union as West Virginia.

So it seems slavery was a pretty significant issue for Virginians–more than the Governor argued. Or pretended to argue. After some study and reflection, McDonnell apologized for his omission and amended the proclamation so that it now reads “The abomination of slavery divided our nation, deprived people of their God-given inalienable rights, and led to the Civil War. Slavery was an evil, vicious and inhumane practice which degraded human beings to property, and it has left a stain on the soul of this state and nation.”

One wonders what will happen when McDonnell proclaims “Let’s Reflect On and Study Slavery Month.” Perhaps he will pause for a moment and give us a chorus of Dixie.

In yesterday’s Times, the estimable scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr. had an odd op-ed article entitled “Ending the Slavery Blame Game. ” Whayt made it odd was its construction. At the heart of the piece was Gates’ very interesting summary of recent scholarship about the complicity of African tribes in capturing African people and selling them to European and American slave traders. Sandwiching this summary, however, was Gates’ bid for op-ed relevance, which was his assertion that this fuller understanding of a broader criminal enterprise would give President Obama “a unique opportunity to reshape the debate over one of the most contentious issues of America’s racial legacy: reparations, the idea that the descendants of American slaves should receive compensation for their ancestors’ unpaid labor and bondage.”

Is the idea of reparations still contentious? I guess it is–if somebody brings it up. But reparations seems to be an idea that had a heyday of argument a decade ago, and was then shelved in favor of ideas more vital. But even at the time of its greatest urgency, it seemed to be one of those self-evidently good ideas that became less good once you got into the practicalities. For one thing, there was the question of where the money should come from. No doubt some of the great slave trade fortunes of the 17th and 18th and 19th have been carefully cultivated and survive, but many have been used up, or, more significantly, destroyed during the Civil War. Moreover, it seems hardly equitable to charge the people whose ancestors arrived on these shores after the Civil War with the cost of paying for slavery. It’s very hard to think how my Malanowski forebears, for example, who arrived here in 1905, profited by the institution of slavery. On top of this is the fact that a great many people struggled against slavery and died fighting it. It may seem logical to argue that the descendants of slaves should be compensated by those who supported the institution, but if that is so, is it not just as logical to argue that the descendants of slaves and others should pay compensation to the descendants of the Union troops who died fighting for their liberation? I wonder how Bill Cosby and Oprah Winfrey and Michael Jordan would feel about that.

But what really rankles about the idea of reparations is that is turns slavery into a civil tort–an argument over back pay. Of course it was something much worse, something profoundly more evil, a society-wide, systematic criminal conspiracy. And in his second Inaugural, Abraham Lincoln specified precisely the price that terminating the conspiracy would exact. Speaking a little more than a month before Robert E. Lee’s confederate forces would surrender, LIncoln said “Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said “the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.”

Was all the wealth sunk? Well, Richmond was burned, and Atlanta was burned, and the Shenandoah Valley was torched, and the tremendous value embodied by two and a half million slaves was struck from the books. Was every drop of blood drawn by the lash paid for another drawn by the sword? At least 620,000 soldiers were killed during the Civil War; with the limitations on record-keeping, this figure could easily be as high as 700,000. That was out of a population of 30 million. This does not include the physically or psychologically wounded, or civilian deaths caused by combat, or civilian deaths caused by a lack of food or medicine. And it in no way includes the incredible economic devastation wreaked upon the south, destruction so complete that for a century the south was poorer and more backward than the rest of the country (and let’s face it, Mississippi and Alabama still are.) The destruction fell on north and south alike: sons of southern slaveholders and sons of northern slave ship owners both died, as did the sons of families north and south who did not engage in the slave trade but who acquiesced in its existence.

And of course, some of the last blood shed belonged to Lincoln, in a futile effort to achieve the long-lost war aims of the south. Lincoln saw that the evil was not civil but moral, that the evil perpetrated was Biblical in its proportions, and that the price that had to be paid was stupendous. Those who seek reparations should visit the Union cemetery at Gettysburg or Hollywood cemetery in Richmond or any of dozens of other graveyards: there is your treasure.