In the immortal words of Hunter S. Thompson, the bats are coming home to roost for Labour. Their poll showing on Thursday was the worst it's been for forty years. That's forty years. So Labour are less popular now than they were during Margaret Thatcher's first term, when Michael Foot was leader. And then, if you remember--no doubt because of his intelligence, his honesty and his integrity--Michael was the most maligned person in Britain.
How the hell, I find myself wondering, did it come to this? A year or so ago Labour were riding high in most of the polls and David Cameron was being mocked as a pudgy Tony Blair impersonator who wouldn't convince even his own mother of his sincerity. But then we had the humiliation of the election that never was and it all seems to have plummeted downhill from there. It's a tragedy. And not least because the Conservative Party, when they take office after the General Election, will take the country right back to where it was before Tony Blair's landslide victory in 1997.
You think they've changed? Call me later, I have a refrigerator you might want to buy. George Osborne is already saying there need to be tighter controls on trade union activity. Consider it: tighter than those imposed by Margaret Thatcher, who castrated the unions,and upheld by Tony Blair, who had no more love of the principles of collective action by working men and women than she did.
The Conservatives portray themselves as congenial and liberal because they have learned well from Blair that this is the way to appeal to the middle Englanders who stabbed Gordon Brown in the back in London on Thursday: reflect their conceited and pretty much completely inaccurate view of themselves back at them. But like the middle Englanders, they are not who they seem to be. The Conservatives continue to be the mainstream home of everything that is unworthy, shallow, selfish, materialistic and generally crappy in human nature. As the old saying goes, be wary of wolves who have their hair on the inside.
You have been warned.
Now come back after four years of David Cameron and tell me I'm wrong.
2 comments:
Egad . . . I do so hope this is not a foreshadowing of what lies ahead for the United States of Affluence. errrr - arrogance. errrr -
Yes, so do I! Although after 8 years of Bush there isn't much further down for mainstream American politics to go. We at least have had the good fortune for things to be relatively civilised in the last decade, the Iraq disaster notwithstanding (yes, that's a pretty big "notwithstanding").
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