I may be delving into unsafe waters here in writing about politics, but with the general election in May approaching with the speed and unpredictability of a crazed rally car, I felt compelled to reflect.
You could say that the small number of people who have decided to vote are already giving some indication as to how their decision was made. Whereas once politics was about ideology, principles and beliefs, now it has become a distasteful reality show. A governmental X Factor in which a vote for the Party that best represents your principles could now be considered a vote wasted.
The Liberal Democrats under their more telegenic leader, Nick Clegg, now represent the best option for those who champion leftwing ideals. However, many people I know who believe in their stance, who voted for their Liberal Democrat MP in their constituency, will not be voting for them. They will not be voting for them because it will be a wasted vote that could be better used tactically.
The tactical voting will be played-out as follows between Cameron’s Conservatives and Gordon Brown’s Labour. Phonelines open now.
A huge amount of people; those of the Daily Mail persuasion, who are now prepared to blame Gordon Brown for the recession, the cold winter, their mother-in-law’s hip replacement, and probably the freak outbreak of Norovirus at their child’s school, will be voting for David Cameron. Not the Conservatives; David Cameron. They will be voting for David Cameron on the basis that he is not Gordon Brown, because to vote on the basis on the Conservative Party’s policies this election would imply that the Conservatives had actually announced any policies of their own aside from making retaliatory statements and reiterating, again and again and again, that they are not Labour.
If the current Prime Minister had not just become the nation’s favourite moral panic due to the hysteria of the Press, Cameron’s Party would not stand up to any sort of sustained scrutiny.
Firstly there are their questionable allegiances. The Conservative’s allies in Europe, after David Cameron pulled the Party out of their centre-right coalition in European Parliament, include Latvia’s Fatherland And Freedom Party, whose members celebrate their collaboration with the Waffen-SS against the Russians in the Second World War, and the Polish Law And Justice Party, whose founder, Jaroslaw Kaczyncsky, publicly stated that homosexuality would result in ‘the downfall of civilisation’, shortly after his brother and co-founder, Lech, banned gay pride marches in Warsaw.
Secondly is their apparent incapability to be decisive, best exemplified by Cameron retracting a statement on tax within twenty minutes at the Conservative Party Conference earlier this year. Another example came on 10th February when they unveiled a campaign poster attacking Labour’s “£20,000 death tax”, when in fact they, at their Party Conference last autumn, were discussing a similar deal concerning an £8,000 figure. The only difference between the Parties on this issue was that Gordon Brown’s would actually cover the cost of the elderly care it was to be invested in, whereas Cameron’s wouldn’t; it just resembled less of an attack on inheritance. That’s where most of Cameron’s facade of policies collapse; they are policies trying to cater to every demographic rather than show how they are going to be credibly applied to our political system.
Their statements concerning the economy and government deficit, cutting public spending in a way that would disadvantage those worst affected by the recession such as health workers, the unemployed, immigrant workers on low wages, teachers, and those on average or low incomes, are not only fickle but economically illiterate. The economy needs investment to encourage growth, but the Conservatives are willing to ignore that in favour of omitting words like ‘spending’ from their non-existent manifesto. It would be an overt transfer of resources from the lower and middle-classes to the very well off, who would be largely protected by Tory policy.
As I am writing this Alistair Darling is about to announce the Budget for 2010, an optimistic budget based on growth and expansion, not cuts. Last week unemployment and inflation figures were shown to be falling, and Labour have delivered a set of proposals set to save more than £11 billion in efficiency savings. The Treasury has also shown willingness to detail these savings, giving Labour’s ambitions that extra bit of credibility, the credibility that David Cameron lacks.
Today Cameron has said that the Labour Government had ‘run out of steam’ and that only a Conservative Budget would cause the economy to grow again, but of course he did not give any further detail as to how, or what a Conservative Budget would actually do.
Gordon Brown’s Labour Party is far from perfect but tactical voting for the Conservatives this election is about as effective a protest vote as putting the dirty underwear of two decades ago back on and hoping they will smell better. What this would result in is nothing more than Thatcherism Part II, thinly disguised as centre politics. However the events of the last thirty years has not only seen the death of leftwing politics, as incorrectly linking immigration, Europe and unemployment became fashionable in the media, but the death of political ideology. Never has a Party so blatantly ditched a coherent campaign strategy in a time of such crisis, to try and win an election by telling every demographic what they’d like to hear, regardless of fact, credibility or the likelihood of it ever being put into practice.
This general election is probably going to result in the lowest turnout of voters for years, and it is my fear that instead of voting on the issues like healthcare, education, or the economy, people will be voting against a fictional bogey-man created by the media, or a shiny face on a billboard with nothing behind it.
