Do the Brits have more hoss sense than they've generally been given credit for?

Janet Daly of the Telegraph says she took a gamble on the recently-concluded elections in the UK:

I took the kind of punt that professional commentators are not supposed to risk last week. In the face of overwhelming polling data which was even endorsed by the judgment of the American statistical sage Nate Silver, and the virtual unanimity of my brother pundits, I forecast that the electorate would defy all predictions and vote decisively for the Conservatives. 

Based on nothing but the conceit of my own intuition, I ventured that so many people would be enraged and alarmed by the absurdity of the Labour leadership combined with the effrontery of the SNP which threatened to impose its will (“lock David Cameron out of Downing Street”, etc) on the vast population which had no say in its election, that they would turn out in force to register their resistance.

After some white-knuckle moments, it turned out that she'd been on solid ground:

So we got to Thursday night and the exit poll. You know the rest. Watching the expressions on the faces of the “experts” in the television studios is a memory which I shall cherish. After it was announced at around 1:50am that the Conservatives had held Nuneaton, which had been a crucial Labour target seat, the whole thing became a bit of a blur – literally, because by that time I was crying with relief.

Daly points up the well-duh nature of the assessments of the big-shot polling gurus.

So what was the thought process of this British majority?

Somehow we have arrived at a point where the conscientiously held beliefs and values of the majority of the population have become a matter for secret shame. The desire to do as well as you can in life, to develop your potential and expect to be rewarded for it, to provide your family with the greatest possible opportunity for self-improvement and to do that on your own without being dependent on the state – these are the assumptions that seem to have become so unacceptable that identifying with them is beyond the pale, or at least so socially outrageous that it is not worth the ignominy of admitting to them.
The Left has so dominated the conversation and so noisily traduced the “petit bourgeois” values that guide the lives of what used to be called the “respectable working class” that, ironically, it is only the most socially confident who can openly embrace them. The very people whom Labour needs to attract (and which it did attract when it had re-invented itself as New Labour) are once again being bullied into hiding their true attitudes and opinions. 

So they prevaricate and evade when asked how they will vote because they are intimidated by the condemnation of the Left-wing mob, or else they just are not self-assured enough to make the moral case (even in their own minds) for their choice. But when they reach the sacred solitude of the voting booth, they do what they know must be done for the sake of their own futures, and that of their families, and even of those the Left insists are being disadvantaged – because they genuinely believe that dependency is a bad thing and that self-determination is a social good. 

Which kind of gets us back to the point of the post immediately below.  The Freedom-Haters can cow the populace into not speaking its mind, but as long as it has access to the privacy of a voting booth, quite often it makes a perfectly rational normal-people choice.

Britain, of course, is where Western civilization gets much of not only its political underpinnings - from the Magna Carta to the Glorious Revolution - but its basic level-headedness as well. Maybe this is a harbinger of a hopeful development.

In any event, things just got a lot more interesting for the continent where Greece is about to go bankrupt, Italy is not reproducing fast enough for its native population to match the influx of Muslim immigration, and the Baltic states feel Russia breathing down their necks.

The fat lady has not yet sung.