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f4f3The news that the Guardian has chosen to endorse Nick Clegg's Liberal Democrats in the General Election hardly came as a surprise to me (they supported the attempted coup against Brown last year, and have been anti-Labour for a while now) but it still left me with a horrible sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach.
The first general election I was eligible to vote at was in 1983. At that time moderate and senior Labour politicians had jumped ship to form a new political party, the SDP. A lot of what they said was reasonable, a lot of their thinking sound. I was at Glasgow University at the time, and the SDP leader Roy Jenkins won a bye-election to become our local MP. I think I saw Roy, David Owen and Shirley Williams speak at the Union more than once, and they were all polished performances.
I wasn't tempted to vote for them - my belief then, as now, was that only Labour could deliver, was even vaguely interested in delivering, relief from poverty for the greatest numbers - but I did respect them in a way that would have been unthinkable for Thatcher's Tory party.
Going into the election the SDP/Liberal alliance were running Labour a very close second in share of the popular vote, against a background of the Falklands War, three million unemployed, and bitter industrial unrest. Clearly well over 50% of the voters were against the Tories, and when I went to bed 19 year old me hoped to see that reflected the next morning.
When I woke up, the Tories had a 144 seat majority and I was sick to my stomach.
My fear for this election is that the result of splitting the anti-Tory vote will be the same as it was then. That we won't have a hung, or balanced parliament, that instead we'll have a three figure Tory majority on 40% of the vote.
To me that's a horrible prospect, and one that the Guardian's stance only makes more likely.
I really, really hope that I'm wrong.
1983 Votes summary (from Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Kingdom_general_election,_1983)
The first general election I was eligible to vote at was in 1983. At that time moderate and senior Labour politicians had jumped ship to form a new political party, the SDP. A lot of what they said was reasonable, a lot of their thinking sound. I was at Glasgow University at the time, and the SDP leader Roy Jenkins won a bye-election to become our local MP. I think I saw Roy, David Owen and Shirley Williams speak at the Union more than once, and they were all polished performances.
I wasn't tempted to vote for them - my belief then, as now, was that only Labour could deliver, was even vaguely interested in delivering, relief from poverty for the greatest numbers - but I did respect them in a way that would have been unthinkable for Thatcher's Tory party.
Going into the election the SDP/Liberal alliance were running Labour a very close second in share of the popular vote, against a background of the Falklands War, three million unemployed, and bitter industrial unrest. Clearly well over 50% of the voters were against the Tories, and when I went to bed 19 year old me hoped to see that reflected the next morning.
When I woke up, the Tories had a 144 seat majority and I was sick to my stomach.
My fear for this election is that the result of splitting the anti-Tory vote will be the same as it was then. That we won't have a hung, or balanced parliament, that instead we'll have a three figure Tory majority on 40% of the vote.
To me that's a horrible prospect, and one that the Guardian's stance only makes more likely.
I really, really hope that I'm wrong.
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Date: 2010-05-01 09:00 pm (UTC)When the Tories were kicking and screaming about the slightest touch of regulation
* Almost single-handedly created the black hole of the pension defecit when he introduced a tax on pension funds - a huge, huge negative legacy.
I thought that black hole was more down to companies not making the payments they were contractually and legally obliged to?
* Disregarded advice from the Bank of England when he sold off the gold reserves at the bottom of the market, thus losing 2 BILLION pounds.
I'd heard it was six - but if you give him the blame for selling gold at the bottom, does he get credit for buying the banks at the same point? We should make a profit of well over £20 billion on that
* Scrapped the 10p income tax band, thus hardly offering relief from poverty (and leaving Darling to take the flack).
A terrible decision. He's apologised for it, so I won't.
* Announced that he'd dealt with the culture of boom and bust in 2000. Those words are sounding a bit hollow now during the recession, which was pretty inevitable after debt financed growth. The prudent Chancellor my arse!
How many years of stability did we have? 10? It was a big claim, but it seemed a lot more credibly 8 years before the crash.
So things not mentioned: giving the Bank of England control over interest rates. Intervening in the banking crisis, saving thousands, maybe tens of thousands of jobs, introducing a minimum wage - what were the Tories proposing at the time? Wasn't the minimum wage going to force thousands of businesses into bankruptcy?