It’s been a funny economic period for the last thirty years. We’ve been through thirty years with real wage stagnation. That’s never happened before. There’s been economic growth, there’s been a sharp rise in productivity, but the effects have flown and gone into very few pockets. For a majority of the population, it’s been a bad period. Stagnation, sometimes decline, reduction of benefits, higher working hours, a lot of breakdown of social structure, it’s hard for people to deal with. Now, the parties don’t want to deal with this because their constituency is basically business and the wealthy, so they’d like to divert attention to other topics. Those are called social issues like stem cell research, abortion, and so on. These become not individual matters anymore, which they were before, but rather social policy, and are used (and I presume designed) to keep away from the issues that really affect people.