Anthony O’Hear: Do we have reluctantly to conclude that in 2010, for all our personal chippiness, when it comes to what really matters, deference and servility are now uppermost (or is it just laziness)?

Anthony O’Hear: The main objection to a hung parliament is that it will involve horse-trading, ‘messy’ compromises and sordid lobbying for power, as if such behaviour was not already the norm within political parties, and as if political parties ever did anything other than seek their own power and growth.

Anthony O’Hear: There is no voice offering an alternative to the soft totalitarianism we have become so used to, or proposing any dismantling of the great leviathan bearing down on individual souls. That leviathan gained ground because people believed that it could remedy weaknesses inherent in the human condition, which in another age might have been seen as the inevitable outcome of original sin.