Weak and Wobbly

There is now less than a week to go until the snap (and largely unwanted) General Election. At the moment it doesn’t seem to be quite going as the Tory party envisaged although I have a great mistrust of opinion polling: these sample polls are meant to gauge public opinion but I suspect they are being used to try and lead it: in England, the polls may be overstating the Labour Party’s support to try and frighten soft-Conservative voters not to flirt with Jeremy Corbyn. In Scotland, I think they may be understating Labour and overstating Tory support to try and hoodwink pro-union Labour supporters to vote blue. All this is backed up with an astonishing tirade of slurs, misinformation and downright lies about their opponents. One should ask oneself who is behind this and who stands to gain from it? The only one thing I can say that is true is: Vote Tory, get Tory.

What surprises me in all this is how a party that has lurched as far to the right as the Conservatives have managed to maintain such high poll ratings. Supposedly this is somehow related to the popularity of Theresa May and her robotic “Strong and Stable” message. I can’t see anything remotely strong or stable about her. She is seemingly incapable of streaming a sequence of words together that resemble a reasoned argument and only manages to utter sentences at random that have been pre-programmed into her. This, remember, is the woman that is supposedly meant to be negotiating Britain’s withdrawal from the EU with some of the continent’s best trade negotiators and leading academics. As for stability she has been buffeted around by the deranged bigotry of UKIP and blowing in the wind of whatever whims sociopathic, billionaire media moguls spew in her direction. She is quite the opposite of strong and stable: she is weak and wobbly. Does anyone seriously want to leave her in charge of the country? Personally I think it would be taking a major risk leaving her in charge of the tombola at the village fete.

The problem with all this lies, largely, with our first-past-the-post voting system. It takes a great deal of momentum to even have a chance of being elected in the first place so the only real chance of forcing an extreme political view is to either threaten to take away the votes of a major party in protest (as UKIP have done) or to infiltrate one of the major parties itself. This has been happening to the Conservative party for a long time. At one time the consensus of the party was that of “One Nation Conservatism” a pragmatic, centre-right philosophy intended to be broadly appealing to the masses – largely similar in nature to Christian Democratic parties in mainland Europe. The change seems to have started in the late 1970s with the rise of Thatcherism and a rejection of the post-war consensus. Her successor, John Major, was a One Nation Conservative but by then the damage was already done, notable by his problems with the “SH1Ts.”

There are still a small number of One Nation Conservatives left (the Tory Reform Group is a dwindling band of these) but increasingly they have become dominated by post-Thatcherite rogues and scoundrels. Many have joined simply for the opportunities afforded for deception and theft from the state. In a more proportional electoral system these freaks of political nature would have been flung out to the extremities simply because they would have been forced to create a new party or the system would have moderated them out from mainstream politics. The problem for the country is that there are many people who hold perfectly reasonable right-of-centre political views that have nowhere to land their crosses on election day. The last centre-right leader (or at least he started that way) was probably Tony Blair but I can see that those who hold a moderate centre-right viewpoint may be initially sceptical of Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour. However, for once, I think they should look at what the Tory party has actually become.

Since returning to power in 2010 the Tories have been a disaster for the UK. They claim to want to balance the books but since they have gained power they have doubled the national debt with absolutely nothing to show for it. They have enriched the very wealthiest in society at the cost of everyone else. Initially, it has been the poorest in society who have paid for this: the sick and disabled and those unable to find reasonably paid and secure labour through no fault of their own. They have run the infrastructure into the ground with the health service and education taking the brunt. Their intentions have now been laid bare in that they intend to move on to the moderately well off, in particular those pensioners who have managed to buy their own homes over their lifetimes by removing any assets they have via the dementia tax. Meanwhile, they are forcing an increasingly large number of people into outrageously expensive rented accommodation with little chance to afford their own home. The rents largely benefit a small minority of rich property and land owners. This is not One Nation Conservatism; it is a return to feudalism.

The question is, what can we do to actually rectify this? In the long term, electoral reform must be a priority but that is little help with less than a week to go. I think the real answer is to hang the parliament. Now it must be tempting to take that as meaning a mass execution of the political classes but it is perfectly possible that we may end up with no one party in overall control which could force a return to the centre – particularly as the Liberal Democratic Party could hold sway in any hung situation and are likely to press for the much needed electoral reform. So what I would say is that unless you are convinced that your local Conservative MP is of the centre-right One Nation persuasion to vote for the “Anyone but Tory candidate”. This may mean Labour voting Lib-Dem or Lib-Dem voting Labour or even everyone throwing their weight behind a Green, SNP or Plaid Cymru candidate. There are various websites giving a guide to this such as this one: www.tactical2017.com

So I won’t make any predictions as to what we will wake up to next Friday but I am hoping for a seriously curtailed Tory party. My only prediction is regarding the current Prime Minister whose days must surely be numbered: June will see the end of May.