So go vote! Whichever way you choose to vote, do it!
Bumped into a Labour dude handing out leaflets outside the tube station on Monday, and got into a bit of a chat. Told him I couldn’t possibly vote labour after an illegal war that caused the deaths of countless thousands of Iraqi civilians. If that war had been on Liverpool, he’d be in prison now. But they’re foreign so it doesn’t matter as much. My arse.
His reply was ‘I can’t argue with you there, but this election is about so much more than that, we can’t let the Tories back in’. True, the election does have a lot more going on than that. However, sanctioning what amounts to murder is a pretty big hurdle to surmount in the mental gymnastics required to convince me to put a tick next to a party candidate’s name on a ballot paper. The thought of the Tories getting in fills me with dread, it really does. All reports suggest that that won’t happen. Thankfully, Michael Howard’s campaign of inducing fear based on racist lies about immigration, talking almost exclusively about ‘illegal immigrants’ as a parasitical presence, not as people fleeing persecution, or just desparate for a better life. Rarely if ever mentioning the country’s huge need of a new workforce, with our own population greying, the birth rate dropping, and the public services needing a big injection of skilled workers…
Anyway, voting Tory clearly isn’t an option. Voting for the Labour party isn’t an option. My heart says vote Green – their manifesto is closest to my own convictions. My head says vote Lib-Dem – they are the ones most likely to make any kind if difference. We’ll see what happens when I get there. How I can still be this undecided minutes away from voting? What a weird scenario. Voting Labour used to be so easy – they were the party of workers, of unions, of taxing the rich to help the poor, of solid public services… And aside from a few MAJOR cock-ups (PPP being the most heinous of them), they’re record in the last couple of terms has been OK. Not great, but they do seem to be implimenting some policies that favour the poor. The airport expansion is a bit bogus, the mess that the rail and tube network are in is rubbish, schools still need more money, hospitals need to be brought back from the PPP firms that are ruining them, private contractors who make a balls up of building schools/hospitals/bridges/whatever else need to be held accountable for their mistakes, tardiness and missing deadlines. There are some really bad things, and some good things. But over all that, The war.
Soundtrack – Michael Manring, ‘Soliloquy’; Mike Watt, ‘The Secondman’s Middle Stand’; Miles Davis, ‘Cooking… and Relaxing with the Miles Davis Quinet’; Victor Wooten, ‘Yin Yang’.