The Early Days of a Better Nation

Monday, May 02, 2005


Another rant on the election

Election? What election? If you don't live in a key marginal you could well not notice it's happening. Just yesterday, the first placards appeared on the lamp-posts around here. (Edinburgh West is a Lib Dem shoo-in.) Almost all the attention is going on the swing seats and the floating voters. The total contempt of the parties for their voters could hardly be more obvious. Thus taken for granted, many voters may be tempted to stick it to the bastards. And especially to the bastards who're most responsible for the degradation of British politics: Tony Blair's Labour Party.

Tactical voting. Protest voting. Not voting. They're all feasible ways to punish Labour with a reduced majority or a hung parliament. There's no risk of the Tories getting back in, so why not?

For some strange reason, we're hearing this from two - no, make that three - camps. We're hearing it from the liberal left, we're hearing it from the far left, and we're hearing it from the Tories. And we've heard it all before. For the 80s and most of the 90s the Lib Dems and the far left between them managed to keep the Tories in power: the Lib Dems (or Liberals and SDP, as they were) by dividing the anti-Tory vote, and the far left by dividing the Labour party.

Never again.

Never forget: Tories lie. Tory voters lie about how they intend to vote, and Tory politicians lie about what they intend to do. I don't trust the polls, I don't trust the liberal left to carry off complicated schemes, and I don't trust the Trots to ... well, anything. I don't trust Labour either, but that's a given. The best way to win Labour back for the working class interest is to crush the Tories, to give them not the faintest hope of a revival, to have them crying in their coffee on Friday morning, asking where it all went wrong and looking for backs to stab.

Paradoxical as it sounds, the best way to defeat Blair is to vote for a party he doesn't believe in: Labour. Anything else is pissing in the wind.

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