POLITICIANS  and political pundits like to pretend that we know our history.

The next election will be 1979 all over again, they cry. Or it will be a re-run of February 1974, say others. Perhaps it will be like 1992 say some.

Except it won’t: it will be exactly like 2010 and it will be different from every preceding election, just like every election is unique in some way. The estimable Bagehot of The Economist has written an excellent piece on the subject:

History never really repeats itself. Rather, as Mark Twain put it, it sometimes rhymes. The fit is almost always partial rather than exact—and the echoes and patterns are often visible only at a distance. In the case of the forthcoming general election, British politics may have been too convulsed for previous contests to be of much use in predicting the outcome.

I would recommend you read the whole piece here.