It's Time

(With apologies to Gough Whitlam)

It's time to do a final election post. If you haven't voted yet, kindly take a moment to read through the archives. We've had masses of Iraq and secret detention, mass surveillance, any amount of stupidity, cash-burning PFIs, schools controlled by anyone who will stump up one-tenth of their cost, blah blah blah. Please do not vote Labour. Voting for this government is a negation of voting itself, because they have constantly and repeatedly flouted the terms of our democracy. What matters for Tony Blair is not parliamentary or electoral sanction, but the approval of the powerful, whether they are the US Republicans, the British state's control bureaucracy, the rulers of Russia, China or Saudi Arabia, or any one of several press barons.

But don't go thinking that voting Conservative is at all a sensible option. The Conservative Party has never been sufficiently committed to resist this government's worst excesses. The two main parties have become a cartel, operating a tacit understanding not to broach any important issue. Did you spot the debates on Europe, energy, defence policy (other than "Save the Scottish Regiments" and like flagwaving), regional development, the constitution? I thought not. What is needed is a wedge driven between them.

Even if they were to make the cartel manifest, forming a coalition of self-interest in the event of a hung parliament, this would at least make fully clear that the political choice is now between the Party of Incumbency and the Party of...well, everyone else.

And finally, consider this:

CB: Oh come on Tony, strip off. Let's see that fit body we've been talking about.
TB: You can keep your hands to yourself, Cherie!
Sun: So how fit are you Tony?
CB: Very!
Sun: What, at least five times a night?
TB: At least, I can do it more depending on how I feel.
Sun: Are you always up to it?
CB: He always is!
TB: Right that's enough - interview over. And I'm not doing any kissing pictures!

Well, everyone else and their dog in the blogosphere quoted this from the Sun's eve-of-poll front-page interview with Tony and Cherie. So I may as well. Interestingly, the Sun voice in the quote is that of their specialist royal photographer, Arthur Edwards. It says something that he was sent to Downing Street. Edwards, tiresomely described by the paper as "Our Arfur" (Remember, you are too stupid to spell! Obey!) and constantly played up as "close" to the royal family, was once insulted whilst photographing a royal occasion. The Sun predictably erupted in a storm of fake proletarian outrage, before he was predictably given a CBE. If this sick relationship is to typify the approach they will now have to politics, I dread the next four years. Now, ask yourself this: what on earth did Blair promise Rupert Murdoch in return for that?

Vote Liberal.