I have lived my entire life under governments dominated by either the Labour or the Tory Party. When I was young, there were genuine differences between them – over public ownership of transport, utilities and strategic industries, over the rights of workers in their workplace, over Britain’s attitude to its Imperial legacy.
However in the course of my lifetime the political agenda shifted fundamentally to the right, as the Labour Party under a series of opportunist leaderships shifted its ground to the agenda favoured by the corporate media. So even our drinking water had to be privatised, the maintenance grants that had enabled me to go to university were abolished as the very principle of free education was abandoned, the NHS was increasingly given over to private provision and PFI introduced the opportunity for bankers and financiers to take the large majority of the total taxpayers’ money allocated to any public investment project. Council housing was sold off and not replaced. Foreign policy became entirely subservient to the United States and a neo-con model of continued armed attacks on poorer countries abroad.
What is worse, the scope for expressing policies that lay outside the increasingly convergent views represented by the main stream media and the Tory and Labour Party narrowed, to the point where dissent disappeared. The opposition to the Iraq War of the majority of people was reflected in less than 2% of total UK TV coverage of that war. The fact that consistently a substantial majority of British people want to see railways renationalised never has any corporate media reflection.
Both “main” parties supported giving over £60,000 per British household to bail out the bankers, which is why we are in this debt mess. Both parties support the fact that 99% of the bankers have maintained the same ultra-opulent lifestyles and income, with no price paid for their failure. The corporate media gave no voice at all to the policy alternatives around allowing bad banks to go bust. It would have been 8% as expensive for the taxpayers just to give to the public and companies the amount they lost in UK bank deposits with failed banks.
When Nicola Sturgeon spoke in the televised TV debates, it was the first time in a decade that I had heard opposition to Trident missiles – a view held by over 40% of the population – even mentioned on television. It had become that bad.
And that Nicola Sturgeon moment was an indication that something really has changed. The electorate have twigged that the Red Tory and Blue Tory parties offer no real choice at all. Whether you want the same Thatcherite cuts spread out over a slightly longer timescale is not a choice.
The political system has quite rightly fallen into disrepute. A pretend choice and charade of democracy is not going to fool the entire population. It is not just that Labour and Tory cannot get over 35% of people who vote. It is also that so many people don’t bother to vote through disillusion. They are not apathetic, they justifiably don’t see how it helps them whose nose is in the trough. Combined with the appalling FPTP system, you end up with a circumstance where Tony Blair’s “triumph” of 2005 was won with 22.5% of eligible voters. The system is bust. The legitimacy of government already does not exist – what is newly in doubt is the ability of illegitimate government to foist itself upon the people.
This is the first election of my lifetime where there is a chance really to give the rotten structure a substantial kick. Any human construct, including the SNP, is imperfect, but that Trident moment on TV represented the truth that the SNP is a real danger to the comfortable untouchability of the neo-con UK state. I urge everyone to vote SNP in Scotland as the surest way to start to force change. Many of the SNP candidates whom I know personally – Mhairi Black, Phil Boswell, Chris Law, Michelle Thomson, Tommy Sheppard – are definitely going to bring fresh air to parliament.
In Wales, vote Plaid Cymru. In England, I think Green is the way to go in general, and I wish all the best to Rupert Read in Cambridge. But if you have a good Independent candidate, consider giving them a vote. Citizen participation against the parties deserves encouragement. There are good people in all parties, and there are some sitting MPs – Jeremy Corbyn, Paul Flynn, John Hemmings, David Ward – who I would vote for; they transcend the moral stunting of party politics. Despite profound differences on Scotland, I do urge people in Bradford to vote for George Galloway, who has done so much to oppose neo-conservative wars, and been an obstacle to the cynical exploitation of Islamic communities for machine politics by the Labour Party.
But above all, today will be remembered as a day when Scotland took a giant stride towards achieving national independence. A vote for the SNP is a vote for Scottish independence and for the break-up of the UK state. It matters not what attempts are made to obfuscate that fact, opinion poll after opinion poll post September 2014 has consistently shown no statistically significant gap between the level of support for the SNP and the level of support for Scottish Independence.
This is a great historical trend which the SNP are surfing rather than controlling. The fundamental answer to the political malaise which I described at the start of this article is the break-up of the UK as the sovereign political institution. A vote for the SNP today is part of an inexorable progress towards that break-up. You would be nuts to be a convinced unionist and to vote SNP, and whatever the propaganda the truth is that almost all SNP votes are nationalist votes, and I for one am claiming every SNP vote as a vote for Independence. The utter panic of the entire Westminster political and corporate media establishment is in itself sufficient evidence that this really counts (I loved the description Scotterdammerung). Freedom is a great thing – get out there and vote for it.
This is the one day that we are all independent, in that whoever we choose today controls us tomorrow. I have lived my life under a rotten system which has got more rotten, more corrupt, more intellectually narrow, and more divided between rich and poor. Today is a great chance to shake that system. Get out there now and shake it!
Phil: why not vote for a thorn in the neoliberal consensus?
Also a fair point. If I lived in Bradford I probably would. But I don’t think I’d canvass for him.
Craig: I don’t live in Bradford, and neither do you. And Galloway is as fundamentally opposed to the SNP’s objectives as Jim Murphy is.
George Galloway and the third degree:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j5u1skEoqLs
Many more star-crossed men have departed after cross-examination…
RIP Dr David Kelly
Ba’al,
You are dodging the question of whether Galloway is worse than Labour, given the choice between the two. Being worse than Labour is a pretty high bar.
Phil
I said I had lunch with Mark Ruffalo and found him genuinely sincere and engaged. Plus he paid for lunch! Why do you call him a twat? Because his career is successful?
You are dodging the question of whether Galloway is worse than Labour, given the choice between the two. Being worse than Labour is a pretty high bar.
I think that’s a fairly tendentious question. On the whole, if waterboarded for an answer, I’d say that ethically they’re as bad as each other, and that if Galloway had the power to order a murderous intervention I can imagine the circumstances in which he would. Given means, motive and opportunity, I’d say it would be a draw.
🙂
What a silly question?
Any which city that POTUS orders us to, as he has been advised by those cretins sponsoring the regime in zionistan, silly!
However the crooks and liars posing as our “dear leaders” (we don’t call them that, we only show our love and follow them around with selfiesticks and then upload it to youtube) realise that if they come clean the great unwashed will be stringing them from the nearest lamp post, and in the spirit of self preservation they keep ignoring this sort of silly question.
However, the point in example of the media collusion is here;
A- the generals sitting in their bunkers and playing Dr. Strangelove are fully cognisant of the numbers of dead that their blessed orders of; fire at will, shall produce. Because of those “nice men” (weirdos/puny tossers) sitting in their labs and prostituting their know how for the benefit of the generals and their expensive, destructive, and insatiable appetite for death, mayhem and destruction. For these thugs and bullies without a war will remain in the shadows no one knowing who they are.
B- the media collusion then underplays the numbers of the dead, because; we don’t do body counts, and keep a score of how many dead! In addition to which evidently the numbers of dead in Moscow will be only 153,000 this is an inaccurate figure, the air burst will be creating a lot more dead in a wider area, in addition to filling the atmosphere with toxic isotopes that will kill even more dependent on the wind direction and the general weather conditions.
The notion of acceptable numbers of dead are floated in preparation for the final showdown, on the planet US! The PNAC was not sidestepped, it was moved into the back office out of sight.
I have voted for Natalie Bennett:
Killing people rarely kills their ideas. Whatever we decide people will die. Be it directly at the hands of ISIL, whose barbarity seems to know no limits. Or when they are hit by bombs dropped by the US, France or the UK.
Caroline Lucas September 2014
Green candidate, Brighton Pavilion
The final Guardian/ICM poll puts the Red Tories and Blue Tories neck and neck on 273 seats each, 52 SNP, and the others together 51.
Pretty damn close.
http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2015/may/07/labour-one-point-lead-tories-final-icm-poll
Craig
Here’s what you wrote about Ruffalo after meeting him once eight years earlier:
“I merely wish to point out that in Ruffalo’s case, his is very genuine and very well grounded.”
How the hell do you know that after one lunch? The answer is you do not. You couldn’t. It’s a ridiculous claim.
I know nothing about the bloke beyond your piece and the article you linked. You claimed it was not a puff piece. I read it as exactly that – a privileged liberal hand wringing in public with zero understanding of how their position relates to sustaining the power they decry. Oh and he had a film or something to promote as well. How fortunate.
I’ve met Galloway a few times and seen his campaigning fairly close up. However, I am not deluded to think that this gives me any special insight into such a skilled operator.
Johnstone
“Capitalism is a disease that thrives under feudalism”
____________________
Don’t most historians say that capitalism replaced feudalism?
@Mark Golding “I have voted for Natalie Bennett”
A fine choice. We could do with some Green influence in parliament. It was a toss-up between the Libdems and the Greens for me.
A very clear and important post from Craig.
Galloway combines a courageous and principled opposition to imperialism with the pertinacity and cool headedness that no other parliamentary opponent of New Labour has managed to discover. He is an ornament to the House of Commons, if he loses his seat it will tell posterity about the small mindedness and suicidal sectarianism of a left which is happiest when it is serving the ruling class by de-fenestrating its best spokesmen. He’s worth forty of the Labour Left.
As to Fred’s two cows, as the weird reference to the New Deal makes clear, this hoary old banality comes from the same source as most of Fred’s wisdom: the ultra right, pro fascist Liberty League and its bastards the John Birch Society Ann Raynd and our old friend Senator Henry Jackson, known in his lifetime as the Senator for Boeing.
G H Graham
“Tomorrow, will it be possible to read not a single reference to Israel & Iran even if the topic is pigeon racing?”
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I take it that’s a rhetorical question?
But I share your wish.
Bevin
“Galloway combines a courageous and principled opposition to ..etc, etc..He’s worth forty of the Labour Left.”
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I’m sure that’s right in monetary terms. The £300000 p.a. he earns from his extra-Parliamentary activities IS probably more than the combined amounts that 40 left-wing Labour MPs earn from outside the House.
With a fixed five year Parliament has come the certainty that today will be the day. This has given the media sufficient time to brainwash the population and for the security forces to prepare their measures to correct the elector’s errors to maintain the status-quo. The postal voting system (enhanced by New Labour) is the ideal way to do this as it does not require clandestine measures on the night which could be detected. Given the millions of postal votes and only a select few contituents need to be doctored, the task should be easy. We are all expecting a landslide but don’t hold your breath yet as there are powerful vested interests involved. Hopefully the electors have finally awoken and even the tampering won’t affect the outcome.
I weighed ‘LibDem’ Abe and dropped the idea on the word ‘pledge’ which to me means promise, oath word -and I am not high hatted or simon-pure.
Sorry is just not good enough.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8iN6-Oev6Po
He’s worth forty of the Labour Left.
Not in terms of changing anything, he isn’t. Forty of him might be. 45-50 of the SNP will be, hopefully.
Freds fucking cows.
Did I hear right, 50m registered voters out of a population of 64m – 78% ? A usual 60% turnout equal to 30m votes in all expected then. Just keeping track of any postal votes (4m x 90% turnout) discrepancy that may arise.
I loved it when Galloway made such a fool of Senator Norm Coleman.
Regarding the introduction of PFI by Blair’s New Labour, some people believe that is where the bulk of Blair’s fortune comes from and is another reason why he hides the sources of his income. I think much of his wealth comes from deferred payments – kickbacks – for providing free forced labour to business under Workfare to save properly employing them.
Latest (and presumably last) FT projection puts Labour + SNP + Plaid Cymru + SDLP + Greens at 328. http://elections.ft.com/uk/2015/projections
“I loved it when Galloway made such a fool of Senator Norm Coleman.”
____________________
You’ve said that before on here.
Does what you love or don’t love become more interesting the second time round?
Abe Rene, what is your assessment of the Lib Dems, post-coalition? I think their name is mud on this corner of the internet (and I largely share that view) but I am interested in an opposing opinion. Clegg in his campaigning said that Tory austerity would have been a worse had it not been for their restraining influence, but unless there is some vote they can point to, or some specific internal discussion, I doubt we will ever know.
In my constituency, it is either Labour, or the Lib Dems – the Tories don’t get a look in. Here people could plump for the Lib Dems if they are sufficiently opposed to Labour/Miliband, but they would then risk propping up another Tory government. Quite a risk I think, as things have turned out.
Personally, I think it would help if Clegg himself gets his marching orders, and the party can go into a period of revitalisation, and get a leader who will rule out Tory coalitions. Aside from his debate appeal, I think Clegg and party was voted for as a “not red Tory” alternative to Labour. Unfortunately at the time, he had said to the media he didn’t want the Lib Dems to be seen as a Left alternative to Labour, but I don’t think this was widely known as we went to the polls last time.
@Juteman, Fred appears to love his cows, but I don’t think there’s any evidence of that particular allegation.
/runs off
Lysias
“I loved it when Galloway made such a fool of Senator Norm Coleman.”
Me too. It was very impressive.
Phil’s argument for not voting is certainly defensible – indisputable, in your satrap across the Atlantic. But in the UK, the state’s disease is more advanced than in the USA. In a functioning totalist state, voting is futile by design. But the UK’s dysfunction can make it possible for votes to torque the state.
When the USSR was collapsing, its most hard-line satellite East Germany dropped dead first. The UK is the USA’s East Germany, and it’s following that pattern of collapse, impelled by the characteristic tensions of that role. Don’t forget that the Party presided over the DDR’s dissolution when elites acknowledged it as a social necessity. So destabilizing the state-sanctioned parties is only the first step. Then, someone in the state throws in the towel: “Ich liebe doch alle – alle Menschen – Na ich liebe doch.” Maybe Galloway will do the honours. Then Scotland will be free.
Around here there are a smattering of Con posters, many more Labour, a few Plaid and one UKIP. But not a single Green poster anywhere.
One reason for this might be the slackness of the candidates. My wife had telephoned, left messages, sent emails and filled in forms on-line, asking the Green candidate for a poster (big as they like), and offered to help. She’s been doing this for over a month. Got nothing back except “later”, when they could be bothered to answer at all. I actually met the candidate at a hustings I helped organise for 38 Degrees last week – he promised to get a poster and leaflets around RSN.
Got nothing so far.
As a result, both of us are likely to vote Plaid. The Green party actually had me convinced they were worth voting for at one stage.
http://www.filmsforaction.org/articles/how-easily-the-fickle-rich-are-swayed-russell-brand-puts-down-his-pitchfork/
NB above a written piece, not a film