After a seemingly-endless yet curiously anodyne period of campaigning, the moment to actually vote is almost upon us: tomorrow is the 7th May - Election Day!
You can call me dogmatic, a fool, old-school or whatever, but I see no sense in voting anything other than Labour when I cast my vote tomorrow at Ramsbottom Library. The reasons for this choice are (to my mind) simple enough: in their five years in power, the coalition (main partners, the Tories; sleeping - nay, comatose - partners, the Lib-Dems) have done little but break promise after promise - no top-down reorganisation of the NHS, bringing debt under control by the end of the Parliament, no rise in tuition fees, no rise in VAT and so on - in the course of punishing the poor, the vulnerable and the sick whilst lining the pockets of their mates in the banks and big business. We are constantly told about ‘the economic recovery’, yet the average person in the street has seen no rise in wages over the last five years: any such ‘recovery’ seems to have benefitted the owners of the companies but not the workers who staff those companies. The Tories (let’s call a spade a spade: a shotgun marriage between a vicious, snaling lion released from captivity after 13 years and an amiable, bumbling hamster would never be described as ‘a coalition’!) and their allies in the Street of Shame have spent that five years trying to drive a wedge between those of us who do not share their priviledged existence: blame the immigrants, scapegoat the ‘undeserving’ poor (as opposed to those ‘hardworking families’ - i.e. employed) and, most of all, blame the previous Labour government.
David Cameron has spent a copious amount of time reminding people of the deficit that the coalition inherited when they came to power. He even (supposedly) had a copy to hand on the campaign trail this week of the note left by the outgoing Labour administration to say that there was ‘no money left’. Leaving aside that that the note was the kind of jokey note that is always left for the incoming government and the unlikelihood of Cameron carrying it around with him, I can agree with him that the coalition inherited a deficit. Where we disagree is the reason for that deficit. Cameron and his cronies have, from Day 1, banged on about it being Labour’s fault and , as such, an illustration of ‘typical’ Labour mismanagement of budgeting in office. Leaving aside the fact that, upto 2008, Labour were doing very well, thank you, and fiscal ‘mismanagement’ would have been impossible to claim, a little incident came along in that year that screwed everything up for everyone and, boy, do I mean everyone! The global financial crisis that hit in that year toppled some banks, almost toppled many others, brought the Eurozone to the point of collapse and cost an arm and a leg in this country to avoid us becoming an economic basket case. Sub-prime lending and completely reckless investments, begun by US banks but then replicated in this country were behind the crash. It is true that newly-relaxed banking regulations under Labour did not help at all. However, at the time, the Tories actually urged Gordon Brown to go further in relaxing the rules. I think it would be fair to say, therefore, the banking crisis was facilitated by the naivety of politiciancs of all stripes when it came to trusting the banks. However, only Labour is blamed by the Tories: the spendthrift bankers are never mentioned. And that gravy train just keeps rolling...
My personal ‘red line’ is the coalition’s deceitful treatment of the NHS. “No top-down reorganisation of the NHS” trumpeted Cameron pre-election in 2010. Equally, there was no mention of any NHS reorganisation in the party’s manifesto. However, almost immediately after coming to power, the coalition embarked on the biggest top-down reorganisation of the NHS since its inception in 1948. At a cost of some £3 billion (a conservative estimate), the NHS was transformed from a fairly bureaucratic but understandable structure into an even more bureaucratic structure. Tiers of management were stripped out and replaced by addtional layers of managers! Overnight, people who had worked in the NHS for years suddenly found they had no idea who was responsible for certain services. If it was bad for NHS employees, just think how patients and members of the public felt! And, to cap it all, on the eve of the election, the re-organisations have been largely abandoned as an unworkable and unwanted change. £3 billion wasted in a time of so-called austerity.
There are many other awful decisions by the coalition I could cite (the Bedroom Tax, employing IDS in the cabinet etc.) but I don’t want to waste more time on such obvious targets. So, the Tories and their corpse bride, the Lib-Dems, are out as voting options. UKIP are the neanderthal wing of the Tory party who, seemingly, have noting to offer beyond stopping immigration and getting out of the EU. If these two things don’t happen, then they have absolutely no funds for anything else in their manifesto. One-trick ponies and it’s a poor trick at that. That leaves the Greens (in terms of ‘real’ parties anyway - I realise there will be other chancers on the ballot paper who are looking for the quickest way to dispose of their deposit fee). There are things about the Greens that I like: locally, their candidate, John, is a nice guy and I think he would do a good job for Bury North. Nationally, I have some concerns - manifesto too much of a wish-list? track record in Brighton patchy? - but it would be good to see them get some more seats in Westminster. However, when it comes down to it, Bury North will be a straight contest between Labour and the Conservatives: voting for anyone else will not alter that fact. The incumbent, David Nuttall, has, frankly, done zip for this constituency. He is on the list of top ten Tory MPs most likely to defect to UKIP, opposes same-sex marriage and pay equality between the sexes. I am surprised that in the last few weeks he has managed to find his way back to Bury, suddenly realising that being quite so low-profile is probably doing nothing for his re-election chances. In a desperate last fling of the dice, he brought the Tory battle bus to Ramsbottom last week...and virtually no-one saw it. They visited one section of the newest estate where they had obviously found a concentration of confirmed Tory supporters before departing like thieves in the night. Campaigning only with your core supporters seems to have been a staple of this election and has been the same for all parties. As noted above, ‘anodyne’...
I know Labour at a national level are not perfect but, when we all vote tomorrow, we do need to remember that we are, first and foremost, voting for our local MP, the person who will best represent our interests on the national stage. James, the Labour candidate, is the only representative of the main parties who has consistently campaigned for a 'Fair Deal for Bury’ and seems to have the ‘tools to do the job’. For those reasons, I shall be voting for him tomorrow. If, as a side effect we will then see the back of David Nuttall forever and, hopefully, the Con-LibDem coalition that has proved so ineffective in ensuring “we are all in this together” over the past five years, then, all the better.
Basta! Vote Labour GE2015!
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