In a way, the UK election highlights what a weird and terrible spot America finds itself in.

Labour won a massive 290-seat majority in the UK after a campaign based on the one-word title of its manifesto: “Change”.

But there won’t be much change and beneath the surface, it wasn’t much of a win.

By contrast the US stands at a T-intersection, looking right and left: The paths on offer this November go in opposite directions; the stakes couldn’t be higher.

And as an aside, thank heavens Australia is more like the UK than the US.

The UK’s first past the post voting system has delivered Labour a whopping 63 per cent of the Parliament with 33.8 per cent of the vote, the smallest share of any government since World War II.

The Tories’ share collapsed from 44 to 24 per cent, but none of that went to Labour; instead, it went to other parties that had no chance of winning seats – mainly Nigel Farage’s Reform, which ended up with five seats.

It was definitely a landslide in terms of seat numbers, but not otherwise, so Labour’s huge majority was a quirk of the voting system.

If they had used Australia’s preferential voting – introduced by Billy Hughes in 1918 to prevent the two conservative parties cannibalising each other – it would have been a different story.

And as for “change”, it seems there won’t be any that matters, apart from climate change. Labour has committed itself to policies that are indistinguishable from the Conservatives in three key areas: Limiting government spending and borrowing, not restoring the........

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