I’ve been reading about the upcoming British elections. Unlike in America, British elections seem to go on forever. It seems that they have been talking about this election for years! I’m kidding, of course, but British election shows are following the same arc as American election shows. As soon as one ends, a new one starts up. I guess it keeps the political consultants off the streets.

For Americans, British elections are a good indication of where things are going in our own lands. Thatcher became the head of the Tories in ’75 and Reagan became the de facto leader of American conservatives in ’76. Thatcher became PM in ’79 and Reagan won the White House in ’80. It’s not a perfect bellwether, but it is useful. We elected the vulgarian Bill Clinton and the Brits followed that with the execrable Tony Blair.Sometimes America is the trend setter.

Even so, it’s worth noting what is going on in the mother country. The fraying of the political parties in Britain cannot have an analog in the US due to our system, but the general disgust with the political class is something we’re seeing on both sides of the Atlantic. That’s the point of this piece in the Guardian last week.

Public mistrust of government is high in Britain, and deference to the political elite has also collapsed as economic woes erode living standards. Amid all that, voters are deserting the Conservatives and Labour, Britain’s two main parties of the right and left since the 1920s, in droves.

In the 1951 election, Labour and the Conservatives – or Tories – shared 96% of the vote. By 2010 they could only manage 66% between them.

At the last election in 2010, Cameron – the first Tory leader since the 1960s to be educated at Eton college and Oxford University, an upper-class combination somewhat comparable to the Ivy League – successfully ousted Labour after 13 years of Blair and then Gordon Brown, but his 306 seats to Labour’s 258 left him 20 short of an outright majority.

The Conservative leader was forced into the first peacetime coalition since the Great Depression, his partners the middle-of-the-road Liberal Democrats who had staged a revival since near-extinction in the 50s and had won 57 seats. A coalition of some kind – or a minority government, rule by a party that does not have a majority of MPs – seems likely again this year.

From where I sit, the Tories look a lot like the GOP in that they have run out of reasons to exist. When you have caved on all of the important cultural arguments, what argument can you offer to voters other than you will wear a tighter fitting eye shade whilst managing the custodial state? How is Cameron different from Blair, other than being taller?

The other issue, of course, is the national question. That’s always the topic when discussing UKIP. It is the thrust of the party and the tool they are using to dig out the innards of the Tory party. I suppose you can add in a healthy bit of economic nationalism as well as economic populism. No national figure in the US has picked up this issue yet, but it is looking like Walker and Cruz are working on their conversion stories, in the hope of repeating what worked for Dave Brat.

It’s convenient to dismiss UKIP as the party of yahoos, just as it has been easy to dismiss Tea Party types in the US. The thing is, I wonder if the appeal of the Scottish Nation Party is really just a veiled and uniquely Scottish protest against immigration. There’s no economic reason for Scotland to break away. There’s not a language or cultural barrier that is big enough to warrant a split.

I looked up SNP’s position on immigration and it is nonsensical, therapeutic state gibberish.The national appeal is by definition exclusive and they make clear they intend to restrict immigration. On the other hand, they moan about being victims and having their feelings hurt by the mean men of Westminster. My hunch is the average Scot hears “Scotland for Scots” when he thinks of SNP.

Demographics certainly plays a role as we see in the US. Scotland is white, very white. The latest demographics say 96% white as a matter of fact. England, in contrast, is 85% white. In America, pasty regions up north love talking about diversity, while diverse parts of the country are more restrained. Diversity romanticism does not sell very well in the Southern states, for example, as everyone there has more than their fill of diversity.

I suspect something similar is at work in Britain. The SNP can wax romantic about immigration and pretend they are treated like foreigners by the English. They can afford such loose talk. Their brothers to the south have to navigate through Londonstan and have a very different view of the rainbow coalition. A couple of muzzies saw off the head of a Scottish soldier in Glasgow and I suspect we get a different tune from SNP.

The old divisions in the Anglosphere were mostly about economics. The Left embraced Fabian socialism and the Right embraced free market capitalism. Today, everyone agrees on economics. Global capitalism is the economic foundation of the ruling elite. Where they differ is on biological reality. The cultural globalism espoused by a Jeb Bush assumes nurture is everything and nature is nothing. At the heart of the nationalist appeal is the implicit assumption that nature, not nurture, is what defines us.

The nurture crowd still controls the high ground in the West. They press on with their program, despite the rumblings of discontent. The fact that these issues are part of the public debate is progress of sorts. I suspect American pols are watching what is happening in the UK with great interest. Gains by UKIP and SNP could change a few minds on this side of the Atlantic.