Gordon! Gordon! Gordon! Out! Out! Out!
There was a biggish demo in London today, against public spending cuts and redundancies in the public sector. On my wall, I have an 18th Century print of Canute attempting to hold back the sea, and this demo reminded me of that. You can demonstrate all you like, but it won’t make a ha’porth of difference; cuts and redundancies there will be, whoever wins, whatever happens.
The New Party showed their indifference to the power of the demonstration when a million people marched through the streets of London opposing the Iraq War, and they still went ahead anyway. This got me to thinking about why I hate them so much, while my lifelong visceral hatred of the Real Tories has settled down into mere nausea… it could be something to do with age of course.
But what I think it is, is this. People say that the Real Tories look after their own. And so they do. And so they will. We know the Tories, and what they are like. My hatred of the New Party comes about because they haven’t looked after their own. They took for granted their ‘core vote’ in South Wales, the rust belt of Scotland and the industrial North of England, and left them to rot on benefits. They hired Frank Field to ‘think the unthinkable’, and he did, and they sacked him. And then they got on with looking after the Tories’ own; they slavishly accepted the Thatcherite economic model, felt relaxed about people becoming seriously rich, and fuck the rest. Don’t forget who was Chancellor the whole time that they let the City run the economy as it liked, for immediate short-term gain. That’s right; the same man who signed the cheques for all those lovely illegal wars, which a million people demonstrated against in vain.
This IS good news!
I used to know a Sue Shand who played tenor sax in a Los Angeles band called the Stilettos circa 1979/80, but i don’t think she sensibly forswore the icky rock’n’roll lifestyle and went to Lancaster Uni in later life. But if this IS you, Sue, and you DID, then why the hell didn’t you phone me when you hit Blighty? I still have those love beads and the bong you lent me after that Cheap Trick concert.
BTW, just to get back on message for a mo’, did anyone hear the Campaign Director of UKIP on R4 this afto announcing that his party would rescind the smoking ban in pubs? I may have to review my voting intentions after all (although a response to my latest blog parlayed the fabulous intelligence that there is, after all, a Monster Raving Loony Party candidate in Brecon & Radnor. Hurrah!). See http://www.markswill.wordpress.com for the glorious good news.
I remember the occupation well Ian. Ahh, the joys of a university education! I also remember Stephen Twigg going off in a huff because someone told him he couldn’t speak at the rally (wasn’t me) What ever happened to him anyhow? The meetings in the Senate room were almost as exciting as the French revolution…although learning how to juggle wasn’t quite the same as chopping people’s heads off. It was all very good-natured really…for a revolution…
Eee, I remember when we were young radicals, Ms Shand. Do you recall the Senate occupation at Lancaster in, ooh, 91 or 92? It’s one of my favourite stories…
I was en route to my Grandads funeral, and had stopped in one of the campus caffs for a quick spot of something before setting off. I had a suitcase with me, in which I had the nearest thing I had to a smart suit. You were waitressing for some corporate event in the private dining room next door, and there were hundreds of sandwiches left. You sidled up to me and said, ‘Quick, Ian! Open your suitcase, and take these sandwiches up to the Senate Room. I opened my case, and we scooped in the contraband snacks. I then toddled up to the Senate Romm, and laid out a generous buffet lunch for the occupiers, to universal acclaim. Then I caught the train down south to Grandads obsequies, which were to be held the following morning. My Birth Father has never forgiven me for standing in Guildford crematorium in a suit smeared with egg and cress sandwiches and veal and ham pie.
It’s a dilemma Ian, that’s for sure. I have spent years drumming into my children the importance of using your vote. “People died to get you the vote, how can you not use it!”. (You can see that I’m not above a bit of judicious emotional blackmail in a good cause.) So here I am, torn between the *New Improved* Tories …remember the poll tax and student loans, …and Thatcher’s absolute determination to destroy the power of the unions through the destruction of their industries …and the privatisation of everything else? Oh yes, it’s the same party underneath all that soapy newness. Although I too am beginning to quite like Cameron, scarily.
Then, in complete contrast, there’s Gordy …who I wouldn’t vote for if he was the last left-of-centre politician on earth. Not least because his knee-jerk panic-struck reactions keep hitting me in the pocket. As one of yer av’rige great-unwashed scrounging single-parents I can’t see either of them doing anything but make me poorer in all respects. Gordy’s done a brilliant job of reducing our living standards in favour of… well probably politician’s expenses and banker’s bonuses. It’s like Robin Hood in reverse. He just can’t do the Radical New Labour thing and doesn’t want to be seen associating with the Old Labour Socialists either so what IS he exactly? Janitor?
So luckily for me, it’s a straight fight in my constituency between the Tories and the new replacement for the retiring LibDem incumbent (“…to spend more time with his family…”); who just happens, as a bonus, to be a woman. Great, the tactical vote solves my problem….oh hang on, did I actually fill in that electoral registration form?
‘The English people believes itself to be free; it is gravely mistaken; it is free only during election of members of parliament; as soon as the members are elected, the people is enslaved; it is nothing. In the brief moment of its freedom, the English people makes such a use of that freedom that it deserves to lose it.’
That’s Rousseau, that is. You could still vote UKIP, Mark; Monster Raving Loonies true successors…
Whilst I must commend Ian for (more or less) maintaining a daily blog during at least the early days of this wretched election campaign, just as county councilors and their executive staff benefit from the funding handed to them by national government and, increasingly, the EU to feather their nests (if not their duck houses), then so too do all national MPs and their subordinate, mushrooming quangocracy who are already and will in future be increasingly dependent on Brussels for their livings. In other words, none of them will or even could make any tangible difference to our daily lives, at least not in a benign or constructive way.
So who to vote for, if at all? Well if they still existed, I reckon Monster Raving Loony would be the way to go. But they don’t, so I think I shan’t.
Perhaps needless to say, the aforegoing is just a snippet of MY latest, less frequent bloggery concerning this exciting example of democracy in action, so in the unlikely event that you’d like more of the same, do please give me a tinkle on http://www.markswill.wordpress.com
Thank you James. You’ve cheered an old man up.
It may seem a bit irrelevant, but I really and truly regret spraying the term ‘chav’ around in The Longest Crawl. If ever I got a chance to do a revision, I’d change that, but I’m not sure what to…
While I share some of your frustrations I’m not sure that’s entirely fair. I think back to the daily stories about grannies waiting years for a hip replacement under the Real Bastards, for instance, and wonder whether we haven’t seen an improvement. The tax credits scheme also raised income for a fair few households – though it was indecipherably complex. Obviously I’m commenting from a fair distance away and with the viewpoint that in comparison to the government I live under (which includes a far right party full of xenophobes and racists) pretty much any alternative looks quite good. I think part of the “failure” of New Labour lies in not defining any real political philosophy to root its governance in, merely accepting the status quo. Without that, and without having the bollocks to go out and sell it, to say to people “this is what we stand for and this is what we’re going to do” its governance looks incoherent and slapdash. I’m not asking for any real dogma, just some sort of guiding principle that would allow various policies/decisions to be connected, understood and followed through, rather than banged out as some sort of “work-around” to patch the system. I think it’s that failure that leaves new labour looking like it merely reacts to whatever the current situation is, rather than changing it before a problem arises. Massively overblown borrowing and huge bank bonuses weren’t seen as a problem until it all went pear-shaped, there was no tiny little bit of political thought there saying “actually, this is wrong, this isn’t how things should be”, or if there was it was drowned out by the voices shouting “if it aint broke…” It’s also that tiny bit of thought that might have allowed them to address the unemployment you talk about, rather than see it as an inevitable feature of modern Britain. They failed to challenge the Daily Mail notions of crime, unemployment and sink estates, they allowed the wholesale labelling of the lowest class as “chavs” to go unremarked and they prostituted the education system into some sort of “job training” system, run by “business leaders”.
Actually, come to think of it, your blog wasn’t nearly harsh enough. Fuck the bastards, they’ve betrayed us.