Priyamvada Gopal is back. In case you miss it, let me draw your attention to her phrase 'Without obscuring real political differences' - she means between illiberal dictatorships and liberal democracies. I fear you might miss the quoted phrase because this is pretty much all she says to register that there are such political differences. Apart from those five words, her whole column is an exercise in marginalizing them. Her technique, in a nutshell, is to present the current protest movements in the Arab world and those against cuts in this country as being, alike, anti-capitalist, while minimizing the aspect of the demand for basic democratic rights and liberties in the Middle East. So Gopal scoffs at the idea that protesters there want 'to be treated as citizens not subjects'. She thinks it 'simplistic to assume that protests in the west and the Middle East are fundamentally different because "they" are fighting "blood-soaked" despots while "we", after all, live in liberal democracies'. The democracies are 'defanged'. And so forth.
This is the standard of comparative political analysis Ms Gopal favours. Obscure real differences while saying that you musn't. Depict as simplistic an emphasis on the difference, in particular, between the presence and the absence of democracy. The degree of stupidity it takes to think like this wouldn't disgrace a political ignoramus.