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Why Labour supporters should examine their conscience
Posted by Greg Leader Cramer
Thursday, 14th January 2010
I think that many good and worthy people beating the drum for New Labour ahead of the election must be doing so even though their hearts are not in it. Maybe you can forgive and forget about taking the country into Iraq. Maybe you can overlook the insult to our intelligence that was the debate over 42 days and all the other assaults on our civil liberties. Perhaps you can ignore the mismanagement of the economy that left us dangerously exposed to the finance and property sectors and with unsustainable levels of personal debt, with the government all the while drunkenly spending like the rising tax receipts could never go into reverse.
I am not so one-eyed as to suggest there have been no successes: the NHS has certainly come a long way and schools have had a badly needed infusion of cash. These successes have, however, come at a cost, and for each one of those, there are so many more failures that we can point to. Energy? A looming energy gap. Environment? A yawning chasm between Labour’s rhetoric and its achievements. Defence? Characterised by a penny pinching, incompetent bureaucracy. Housing? Continuing chronic under supply of new housing. Immigration? A laissez-faire approach that has led to the build up of social pressures and public resentment. I could go on and on.
Maybe you are able to overlook all of that and focus only on the successes. However, surely the most ardent New Labour supporters heart must sink when it reads that Britain now educates a smaller proportion of its 15 to 19 year-olds and its 20 to 29 year-olds than it did in 1995, an achievement shared only by one other country (France for the former and Portugal for the latter) among the 30 OECD members.
Perhaps all this proves is that governing is hard. I am sure that if this government could turn back the clocks, they would do things differently in many policy areas. But they cannot. The pact New Labour made with the capitalist devil when they took office has unravelled as the tax receipts have dried up in recession. Faced with the unthinkable prospect of cuts in public spending, their raison d’etre has been taken away and they look and sound defeated. The Conservatives, for their part, having been promising (pre-recession) largely to continue New Labour spending patterns if they won the election, also now sound lost and in search of a convincing narrative.
I’m not going to insult you by saying you should switch allegiance – that would be ridiculous. But do your conscience a favour and don’t go out and campaign for a party that you know you have run out of patience with. When it comes to election time, do the country a favour - stay at home and let the other lot have a go. After all, in all probability they too will foul things up at some point and someone else will take their place at the helm.
