Let me say a word in Pete's defense: he was writing that series circa 1989-94, and he was trying to extrapolate British politics 30 years into the future with global warming -- from the dog days of the Thatcher era. He's not, AIUI, anything like as right-wing as the spin on that series would have you believe (if you believe that an author's politics are transparently deductible from their fiction -- a belief I'd characterise as naive, given that the process of writing fiction is basically the art of telling amusing lies for money).