Killer conservatives. (Scan).(relationship between suicide and conservative governments)

Conservatives are used to being called callous and uncaring, being accused of wanting to throw grandmothers out in the snow, starve school kids, cut down every tree in sight, poison all the rivers and lakes, bomb the Third World, lock up minorities, and so on. But until recently the full evil of conservatism has been successfully concealed. Now we've finally learned that conservative rule makes people want to kill themselves.

"Suicide Rises Under Conservative Rule," says a September 20 headline on the Web site of Nature magazine. "A nation's suicide rate increases under right-wing governments, according to two studies that have looked at Australia and Britain over the past century." As the saying goes, we're not making this up. The story was based on two articles in the British Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health. One of the articles, entitled "Mortality and Political Climate: How Suicide Rates Have Risen During Periods of Conservative Government, 1901-2000," has a subhead that tells it all: "Do Conservative Governments Make People Want to Die?"

Some extracts: "Alienation and isolation may run higher in societies driven by competitive market forces.... Left-wing rule, focusing more on equality, might put people under less pressure." One study in Britain suggested there were 35,000 more suicides under Conservative governments in the twentieth century than there would have been had the Labour Party been in power for the entire century. Of course, fancy statistical regressions can't handle counterfactual scenarios, such as the economic suicide that perpetual Labour Party rule would ...