The Sharp Side

After knocking back a few beers I suddenly felt an urge to scribble down all the reasons why I can’t bring myself to vote Labour. (Are you listening, Polly?) It is not intended to be comprehensive. When my throbbing hangover ceases I’ll probably think of some more. But these are quite enough, I reckon.

1. The postal service has turned to mush under Blair. Part-privatisation has resulted in a demoralised workforce, extensive use of low-paid casual labour, the end of second deliveries, the end of four timed collections from pillar boxes, and extensive mis-delivery of post across the land.

2. The annihilation of the public library service under Blair. Nationally, public libraries are in massive decline, with fewer and fewer people bothering to visit them to borrow books. This is largely because local authorities have embraced the Thatcherite-Blairite philosophy that nothing is worth anything unless it turns in a profit. I’ve seen my local library rid itself of thousands of books, chuck out its sheet music and embrace the idea that a library is a money-making rental store, hiring out CDs, DVDs and electronic games. Investment in new books has plummeted. But failure, measured by massive lack of interest in what libraries now have on offer, hasn’t deterred the Blairites, who personally tend to be sleek philistines with no interest whatever in serious culture.

3. Transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich has continued under Blair. The wealth of the top one per cent has doubled from £355 billion to £797 billion. Which is more than the government spent in the last 5 years on health, education and housing combined. Blair and his wife have enriched themselves enormously and were able to get a mortgage on their new London house on the basis that their future earnings/wealth would be worth £20 million.

4. The issue of land ownership isn’t talked about by any of the three mainstream parties. I find it stupefying that most of Britain remains in the hands of a tiny minority of super-rich land owners, most of whom are getting massive subsidies from the state.

5. Aircraft fuel should be taxed. Cheap air fares benefit the affluent far more than they benefit the poor. They also massively contribute to global over-heating. Blair is committed to airport expansion and mass, regular airline use by the affluent middle classes.

6. Local democracy has been corrupted by Blair. One of the great libertarians of local democracy, ironically, was Margaret Thatcher, who made it a statutory obligation for local authorities to publish agendas of meetings at least three days in advance, enabling local activists to find out what was being planned and, if necessary, organise and lobby against it.
Blair replaced a reasonably democratic form of local government with a Cabinet system where a tiny number of councillors (usually around 8-10) take all the decisions, and the remaining councillors twiddle their thumbs in cosmetic consultative committees. Council policy is no longer made public in advance and decisions are now often taken behind closed doors, sometimes between a single Cabinet member and a council officer. All kinds of local voluntary groups have been excluded from participation. Power has been transferred to council officers and Cabinet members.
The scope for personal corruption is now enormous. My own local authority was corruption-free until the Blair local government reforms. Now, though nothing has yet been proved, the whiff of scandal is in the air, with all kinds of questionable land deals and allocations of contracts.
Blair also introduced a massive rise in councillors expenses. A councillor now gets 8 grand a year basic and another 12 grand for being chair of a committee. More senior positions get even more. Until a few years ago a councillor would have been lucky to get £2,000 a year in expenses and whatever their motives were, no one used to stand as a councillor to make money. Now there is serious money to be made. These same New Labour councillors who are coining in an extra 20K a year on top of the day job are the ones forcing through ferocious cuts in a wide range of services, flogging off property left right and centre, shutting down public halls, and forcing redundancies on to the lowest paid workers such as park keepers while handing out lavish contracts to consultants.

7. The Blair government has maliciously terminated the annual national grant to the Woodcraft Folk (a piddling 60K a year) which is an organisation set up as a socialist alternative for kids to the reactionary Boy Scouts. But it has recently given £1½ million to evangelical Christian youth groups to peddle their mind-addling right-wing theology.

8. The Private Finance Initiative. A scam so blatant that capitalists can hardly believe their luck.

9. “The railways are not a priority” said Blair at his first cabinet meeting, back in 1997. Nobody demurred. Fares have shot up, services cut, the infrastructure remains squalid, and millions are given away to creeps like Richard Branson. Privatisation of the railways was a bit like selling a car to someone and then agreeing to pay for all their garage bills and then help them out when they eventually want to trade it on for a new one. It’s an Alice in Wonderland economics. Apart from the fact that Britain now has train fares two to three times what they are in comparable European nations.

10. City academies. Blair hates accountability and state education, so he’s taking secondary schools away from local authority control and giving them away to wealthy entrepreneurs, with lavish subsidies. But how can you possibly make money out of a school? Only if the state gives you hand-outs. It also turns out that filthy rich right-wingers like the idea because it gives them the power to introduce their own loopy ideas into the curriculum. Business is good. Darwin was wrong. The Christian God is everywhere.

11. The Iraq war. As blatant a piece of naked imperialism as you could hope for. The war was about grabbing Iraq’s massive oil reserves and furthering the USA’s ambition of controlling the entire planet, especially the oil rich Middle East. The Iraq war was not about (i) human rights (ii) WMDs (iii) the flouting of UN resolutions.
Blair reminds me of the ring in Tolkien’s wooden epic. He is a force for evil, radiating out to corrupt everything around him. John Scarlett knew there was no hard evidence of WMDs. Lord Goldsmith knew there was no legal basis for war. Weak, ambitious men with spines of rubber they kneeled to give Blair what he wanted, just as weak ambitious men have done throughout history. Goldsmith and Scarlett remind me of Archbishop Cranmer, the man of God who was prepared to twist theology any way that Henry VIII required him to in order to dump the current wife and move on to the next. The same applies to those chauffeur-driven toadies around the big table: as the constitutional expert Peter Hennessy has remarked, Blair’s cabinet is the most supine for half a century.

12. David Kelly. A man with a fragile sense of self cynically thrown to the wolf pack by Blair.

13. Israel. Blair is an enthusiastic and important supporter of the world’s only institutionally sectarian state, where one religion alone entitles you to full citizenship, and which is the world’s last colonialist settler state. Human rights abuses? WMDs? The serial flouting of UN resolutions? Israel has the lot.

14. The scandal that public schools get tax relief as charities. A mind boggling scam that no political party seriously interested in social equality would tolerate for a moment.

15. The annihilation of council housing. Public sector housing has effectively vanished under Blair. Rents have rocketed. Tens of thousands live in squalid accommodation in conditions unimaginable to the smirking fat cats of the New Labour project.

16. Tuition fees. Student loans. The annihilation of the culture that learning is valuable for its own sake and that the state should give people the right to three years of FREE higher education with FREE GRANTS before they plunge into the world of salaried employment.

17. MRSA. Which is the result of the part-privatisation of the NHS and the contracting out of cleaning to profit-hungry firms which make their money out of cutting the salaries and conditions of service of cleaners, or making them redundant, or putting them under such pressure that they can’t possibly clean a ward effectively.

18. The Labour Party isn’t just Blair, says those who urge anti-war voters to vote Labour.
True.
It’s also: John Prescott. Do you really want to vote for a party which has this grotesque buffoon as its nominal deputy? A man who notoriously can’t even string a coherent sentence together. A man who clearly suffers from some sort of eating disorder, which makes him cram down more and more food (is his hero Mr Creosote?) A man too lazy to walk 400 yards from his hotel to a conference hall, who went by car instead.
It’s also Peter Hain: from feisty young radical into pudgy establishment arselicker. It’s smarmy Patricia Hewitt. It’s Jack the man of Straw, who supported the war but now briefs journalists that he was privately against it. It’s Blair’s babes – those sharks of self-interest and pimps of power and profit. It’s lumpish Gordon Brown, who is every bit as reactionary as Blair. It’s wheedling whining Ann Clwyd, whose eyes will gladly water for human rights – but only when it’s opportune to do so. It’s the whole slick, shallow, shifty crew, who will gladly follow their leader to wherever he takes them.

19. Transport policy. Blair doesn’t have one – just the failed strategy of more roadbuilding, toadying to the freight transport lobby and subsidising and encouraging mass car ownership and use while simultaneously allowing the cost of travelling by bus or train to increase and neglecting the public transport infrastructure. A man who blusters about being not afraid to take tough decisions but who is too timid even to support congestion charging.
Cycling, more or less non existent as a viable way of getting around, continues to decline. Pedestrians? They can use the dirty subways and walk the long way round. Pavements are for parking on. If they get knocked down it’s their own stupid fault.
As for bus privatisation. You now get bus drivers who don’t know their routes and take wrong turnings and buses out of St Trinians movies, which expire with a splutter on dual carriageways.

20. Four wheel drives. Very popular with those who have benefited from the Blair years. Big, stupid, pointless gas-guzzlers, driven by rich, smug morons. The vehicle that says “fuck the planet and get out of my way”. Blair won’t even introduce the mild disincentive of taxing these brutes.

21. The Dome. Let’s never forget the Dome. Still draining the public purse, I believe.

22. Fallujah. Let’s not forget Fallujuah every time Blair says how much better Iraq is now that Saddam is gone. Or Abu Ghraib.
Or the 100,000 plus dead civilians.

23. MPs pensions. MPs expenses. MPs salaries.

24. Drugs. Decriminalise them. Let Asda sell cocaine and heroin. Let those who want to shoot up and read Alexander Trocchi do so. But don’t expect any of the three main parties to have a drugs policy that is remotely rational or humane. They’re all too terrified of the Daily Mail.

25. The Sun wants you to vote Labour. Now why do you think that might be?

26. I don’t share the view of those who believe a future Labour government would never dare to join in an American attack on Iran. Of course I’d like it to be true that anti-war sentiment makes it impossible but I’m not persuaded. Next time round you might get 3 million on the streets instead of 1-2 million. Blair still wouldn’t listen. He would still make a speech about human rights abuses before a Labour conference and not get heckled. The powerful toadies around him would continue to toady.

27. Civil rights. The suspension of the right to a trial. Indefinite detention. A battery of legislation designed to criminalise the right to protest or to strike. Take a look at the ferocious restrictions imposed on the Greenpeace protesters who climbed on the roof of Prescott’s mansion last week. Take a look at the way Sussex police are using legislation supposed to be about stopping stalkers to ban protests outside a local armaments business.

28. The arms trade. Sleazy and corrupt. Which continues to enjoy freedom to export instruments of mass murder and torture to vile regimes, and gets massive, gargantuan state subsidies.

29. ID cards.

30. The part-privatisation of London underground.

31. The way in which the ban on driving while talking on a hand-held mobile phone has been cynically designed to fail and is being flouted on a massive scale. A ban which will only become truly effective when the day comes that a driver chatting on one ploughs into a line of primary school kids and kills eight of them. Gosh, won’t everyone be shocked.

32. The blood-drenched farce of road safety. 3,000 violent deaths a year which could be prevented but won’t be in a culture where every new car manufactured is designed to break the maximum speed limit by at least twice that speed, where restraints on dangerous driving are fiercely resisted by the motor lobby, where policing culture doesn’t regard bad driving as a crime, and where the judicial system protects the interests of road killers at the expense of their victims.

33. Because last year BT forced everyone on their bog standard rental to upgrade to Option One. In Blair’s Britain an “option” is – remember this, kid – COMPULSORY. It bumped up my phone bill by around 15 per cent, with no benefits to me. This nationwide scam attracted zero interest from the mass media, no doubt because the people who construct what is “news” are far too well paid to be on anything as vulgar as BT standard. When I wrote to protest to my anti-war MP asking why the telecoms regulator was allowing BT to get away with this abuse of their monopoly power he looked into the matter by getting an assistant to send me some pages downloaded from the BT website, in which BT justified their action. The justification was just PR froth.

34. Global warming. Which Blair is not going to do anything about other than through a massive programme of new nuclear power plants. Apparently he’s saving that until after he gets back in. He’ll say that that’s what they do in France and it’s as safe as safe as houses.
Bang!
Woops, that’s East Anglia gone.

35. Because I managed to find my ancient copy of the second edition of Ralph Miliband’s classic ‘Parliamentary Socialism: A Study in the Politics of Labour’. Among his conclusions are that the Labour Party is made up of “bourgeois politicians with, at best, a certain bias towards social reform. They have no intention whatsoever of adopting, let alone carrying out, policies which would begin in earnest the process of socialist transformation in Britain.”
So why would any serious lefty want to vote for them? Even if the anti-war MPs all get back in they are still just a tiny, ineffective rump. And why do even anti-war MPs have to turn up every day in suits and ties? I want to see MPs who wear T-shirts, preferably with slogans on. I want to see an MP screaming with fury, not politely disagreeing with the Honourable Member for Sludge East.
I’d like to see Reg Keys howling his grief at the ranks of New Labour warmongers. I’d like to see Lindsey German bellowing about the social injustices of Blairism.
I’d like to see a Green shrieking about global warming and the banal complacencies of the House of Commons.
I want to see the first fissures in the stultifying and reactionary Lab-Tory-Lib Dem monolith.
So vote Green.
Or Respect.
Or anyone to the left of Labour (and that’s not the Lib Dems. The Lib Dems are mavericks half way between the Tories and New Labour. Lib Dems are an opportunistic bunch who always let you down.)
Every vote for Labour just encourages Blair and encourages members of the Labour Party.
Every vote for the Greens, or Respect, or an ultra-left candidate, is a vote for people who have a different, radical vision. You might not agree with chunks of what they say but at least they are visionaries, not locked into the current system. And even though they might not win, their morale will be boosted by getting several thousand votes. It will encourage them to keep going.
Whereas if you don’t vote for them, and vote Labour, then you help demoralise the people who’ve taken a stand against Things As They Are. And you give aid and comfort to the sort of people who say: Things will be different when Gordon is in charge, honest.