Thoughts: some hope for the future and why you mustn't vote Labour

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It’s a grey, drizzly day here in Cullingworth – more October than May. But the birds are singing, the badgers have crapped all over the garden and the air still smells of spring. And, of course there’s an election on!

So what can we hope for? Not in the result of the election – that will be what is will be. I feel a clear winner would be good and I certainly don’t share Julian Dobson’s optimism about prospects for a hung parliament. And my pessimism comes from experience – from ten years of horse trading on a hung council. It doesn’t work – politicians are reduced to what I call veto politics. We can stop a policy being implemented but instigating and seeing through a new idea or a changed approach just doesn’t happen – too risky you see.

This polity leads to the triumph of the apparatchik – the politician who is only really interested in staying in a comfortable, well-remunerated post and will do nothing that might threaten that position. Indeed, such politicians will often work across party lines to stop the efforts of others. Everything is tactical, all sense of mission or vision is lost – we have government by a combination of inertia and the lowest common denominator.

I hold out little hope that we will see any change to the unwarranted and unjustified attack on the pleasures of ordinary people. We’ve seen smokers cast into the outer darkness on the basis of dodgy science, we’re now watching as ordinary drinkers stigmatised because of the antics of drunken louts or the illness of long-term alcoholics and the guns are being rolled out to attack the English breakfast and the American burger. Watch closely as other pleasures are identified – gambling, racing dogs or horses, holidays on the Costa – either for reasons of health or environment your judgmental masters will make these more expensive or worse effect a ban.

I hold out little hope that there will be the change we need – the rebirth of individual responsibility supported by the extension of personal freedom and choice. But I do hope that schools will be freed from the producer interests – the bureaucrats, the unions, the know-alls that have so damaged the lives of children from poorer communities these last 30 years. I do hope that more decisions will be passed down to local communities – that we can escape the “District Commissioner Approach” to community development where some educated, middle-class know-all lectures poor people about how they should behave (including – see above – an unjustified attack on their pleasures).

I hope for a government that’s a little less hectoring, a little less interfering and a little cheaper. I hope that the success that free schools will bring will direct us to freeing other services from stifling bureaucratic incompetence. And I hope we will see a government for which the first reaction to any problem is to propose a new law.

And I’m pretty sure that the only way to realise this hope – to have any chance of getting even a little bit closer to the future I want for my family – is to vote Conservative. And I shall do so – and urge you to do likewise. But if – for some reason of historical discomfort, a particular policy or dislike of the candidate – you can’t bring yourself to vote Conservative….

…please, please, please don’t vote Labour.

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