Stale bruschetta
Despite some people’s attempts to keep the fires stoked, I wonder if the emotional blackmail/threats/insults/carrots argument about protest voting against New Labour has just about run out of steam on both sides.
Polly Toynbee tried it again last week on the Guardian’s election blog (thanks John for the link). The guys behind Backing Blair, in an accomodation not shown by the other side, have even gone as far as to adjust their core message.
I fear though, even with two weeks of campaigning still to run, that it’s game over. The polls are now starting to show us what the maths has been showing for weeks. Barring an outbreak of bird flu among its voters New Labour is going to be returned with a handsome majority if not another landslide. A desperate Howard might also yet take the nuclear option and give us a “rivers of blood” speech (he came very close last night) which will almost certainly lock down many floating and would-be protest voters for New Labour ensuring an even larger majority. He might yet succeed where the likes of Hain, Aaronovitch, Toynbee, et al, have so far failed - in galvanising pissed off Labour voters.
At this rate the only fun to be had on election night will be to see if any freak polls take down Howard, Davis or Letwin and if any of the semi-interesting independent candidates have any joy.
Posted on April 19th, 2005 at 9:57 am
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It’s all looking rather depressing, isn’t it. Michael Howard’s desperate attempt to bring back immigration into the fold last night was dull and dreary. It says a lot that they spent 30 minutes of the debate talking about it - and it’s an issue that’s not going to be a vote clincher.
The Tories must want to lose this election.
The latest New Statesman also contained many ‘don’t vote tactically articles’; see:
For Middle Class welfare, vote Lib Dem
and
Nightmare on Downing Street
With regards to the “maths”, whenever I hear things like “uniform swing” nowadays, and “impossible for the Conservatives to gain an overall majority”, I think somebody has a pretty fundamental misunderstanding of the voting system. One party’s going to need to win 11-12 million votes. Perhaps that’ll encourage you not to lose all interest in the final 2 weeks?
Personally I’d like to see the Tories crushed - maybe a new and interesting new Conservative party (I wouldn’t go so far as to say ‘phoenix’) will emerge…
Justin - don’t give up hope just yet!
We can still make a difference. And check the latest Backing Balir post again - it now has more of an explanation of the change in position.
Robin, the mantra is still, as ever was, “stay on target”. But the polls are refusing to shift significantly and we both know that a 100+ majority will be spun as vindication of the New Labour project.
Hove Labour, you say:
“The concept of swing works on the basis that the votes on May 5 are merely those from 2001 moved from one pile to another, when in fact all parties start from zero.”
Indeed, in practice, physically counting the votes from one, two etc, the parties do all start from zero. But politically or philosophically they do not. Why do the parties sweat over marginals and not over safe seats? Because a huge block of their votes can be taken for granted and the parties then concentrate on the movement of the 800,000 or so votes that dicate the election’s outcome.
Why else would Blair kick off the campaign in Weymouth and not Sedgefield?
(Long post - apologies)
Another of the emotional blackmailers is Nick Cohen. His columns in The Observer over the past 18 months have included the following
7.12.03
Power is New Labour’s first concern: how to hold to hold on to power, how to expand power and how to crush rival centres of power In his attitude to the judiciary, as much as in his attitude to the BBC and his backbenchers, Blair shows an impatience with fetters on power. Listen carefully enough and you can almost hear the PM cry: ‘Do you know who I am?’
14.12.03
For the first time in centuries evidence collected under torture - albeit the torture of a witness in a foreign country - can be used to imprison suspects in Britain without trial. An awful lot of ground is being given up without much of a fight.
21.12.03
the reason why the draconian measures on the statute books don’t give Britain an effective police force, is that once you get beneath all the press releases and gestures from Home Secretaries and Prime Ministers the criminal justice system is as decrepit as many other public services. It has been fragmented by privatisation and twisted every which way by targets and ‘eye-catching’ anti-crime initiatives, as Tony Blair once called them.
09.12.03
ID cards destroy one of the founding principles of Anglo-Saxon common law, that if the citizen hasn’t committed a crime or isn’t giving reasonable grounds for suspicion that he is about to commit a crime, the state has no right to stop him as he goes about his lawful business. One reason why the congratulatory stereotype of the English love of eccentricity contains a grain of truth is precisely because the state has never had the right to force people who look odd or behave oddly to explain themselves. So deep do common law principles run that George Bush rejected demands to impose national identity cards on Americans after 11 September.
Yet the Government is going to impose them here.
11.01.04
¦Lord Hutton certainly heard that the Government wasn’t over-interested in telling the truth. Geoff Hoon, for instance, admitted that he’d done nothing to correct press reports that Iraq had weapons which could hit British bases in Cyprus which he knew to be false.
Spinning your country into a war is about the most serious charge you can level against a government.
08.02.04
It’s always worth watching what politicians do to foreigners, runs an old maxim. It shows what they would do to British citizens if they thought they could get away with it. True to form, the indifference of both barristers and the judges to the basic principles of English law has encouraged Blunkett to see if he can get away with treating British citizens as enemy aliens.
15.02.04
When Blair came to power he cried: ‘Above all, we have secured a mandate to bring this nation together, to unite us. One Britain, one nation in which our ambition for ourselves is matched by our sense of compassion and decency and duty towards other people.’ Whatever his mandate was, he hasn’t fulfilled it.
22.02.04
The mayor of London is as free of local control as the Prime Minister is of Parliamentary control. Both greet big business with moist lips. Both are control freaks.
14.03.04
There will be another crackdown on civil liberties. It’s guaranteed, even though we’re running out of civil liberties for the Government to crackdown on
28.03.04
The PFI is an Enron-style off-balance sheet accounting scam. It’s cheaper for the Government than private consortia to borrow. But by allowing the private sector to go to the money markets, the Government can get debts off the public-sector borrowing requirement, even though the public pays in the end.
The short-termism of politics encourages imprudence. In the long run using the PFI is like borrowing on a credit card rather than taking out a bank loan. But in the long run today’s politicians will be out of office, if not dead. If their successors have to deal with the mess 30 years, even 60 years, down the line that will be their problem.
18.05.04
American politicians are taking practical steps to stop corporations which don’t pay tax getting their hands on tax-payers’ money¦ In secretive Britain, by contrast, it’s impossible to imagine the Government providing the information which would allow a debate to begin.
13.06.04
Labour politicians have chosen to ride the populist tiger and have no way of controlling where that rough beast will take them or us
01.09.04
Perhaps¦ even an electorate as easy to manipulate as the British electorate is going to realise that for more than a decade their fears have been exploited by anti-social elements who treat them as rank buffoons.
08.09.04
The Labour Party wasn’t founded to create a Milton Friedman world of socialism for the rich and capitalism for the poor; where Mike Rake keeps his polo ponies while savers with Equitable Life lose their pensions.
15.09.04
As with the re-resurrection of the career of Peter Mandelson, the holiday with the Berlusconis is a sign that the lesson that Blair has learned from the Iraq crisis is that he can get away with anything. If respectable opinion on the left and the right is outraged, why should he care? It won’t hurt him.
29.08.04
Before the last two scandals, there was the one about Tony Blair choosing to accept a free holiday from Silvio Berlusconi, a billionaire who has bought the Italian media and politics as a job lot. Before that there were Lakshmi Mittal, Enron, Arthur Andersen, Ecclestone.
3.10.04
The New Labour dynasty has many aims but one purpose: to hold on to power at any price.
17.10.04
¦if the wealthy were to devise a system which perpetuated inequality, the system they would come up with would be a fair copy of the British education system which talks the language of anti-elitism while ensuring that the children of the elite prosper.
5.12.04
Last week New Labour sent out a direct mail shot to half-a-million voters. Even by the high standards of the party, it was a masterpiece of deck-stacking. Citizens were invited to fill in a questionnaire and return it in a Freepost envelope. Question 1 was: ‘Do you welcome plans to tackle organised crime, illegal immigration, benefit fraud and national security through the introduction of ID cards?
Yes.
No.
Don’t know.’
My answer is ‘no’, not because I’d like nothing better than for this country to be at the mercy of Mafiosi, suicide bombers and racketeers, but because the question is as fraudulent as the crimes Blunkett wants to tackle.
27.03.05
Correction fluid was used to white-out crosses on postal votes for the People’s Justice Party, the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats, and replace them with crosses next to the names of the Labour candidates. Gangs of children and Labour supporters allegedly toured the streets snatching ballot forms from letter boxes and postmen, and warning householders that they would face a £5,000 fine if they didn’t hand over the postal votes.
About 90 people told the court that they hadn’t applied for a postal vote, but were recorded as voting by post for the Labour candidates none the less. Those who turned-up at the polling station were surprised to learn that they had already voted and must go away. When it came to the count, three boxes were found, containing 1,700 postal votes. By a remarkable coincidence, every last one of them was for New Labour. Stranger still, all the forms seem to have been filled out by the same hand and with the same blue pen.
13.03.05
Tony Blair’s whole career has been based on the assumption that liberal-minded Labour voters will stick with him whatever he does. I wonder if he’s right this time. The hypocrisy of it all is becoming too great. Can he expect to oppose religious totalitarianism abroad while cosseting it at home without at least some of his supporters being crippled by a spasm of disgust?
And yet Cohen concludes“
10.04.05
we’re stuck with the system we’ve got, and I’m afraid that the rather obvious point about it is that it won’t give you a Labour government unless you vote Labour.
A candidate for Private Eye’s Hackwatch if you ask me.
Justin
When TB wins the election expect moral justification for this.
http://www.civilians.info/iraq/
Are you prepared to live with this shit and expect TB to relinquish power?
FF, I totally agree. I wasn’t admitting defeat but simply stating that it wasn’t looking good. The Tories have once again proved themselves to be the shitest opposition ever. The Lib Dems aren’t making inroads and look as if they’re going to settle for boost of around a dozen seats.
If anything, I’m one of the bloggers who’s banged on about civilian casualties more than most and they’re certainly the major reason why Blair has to go.
E.K. - This strikes me as utterly typical from Cohen; I don’t know if you’ve read ‘Pretty Straight Guys’, but he slates New Labour for setting up false inquiries and spinning information to their advantage, then completely contradicts himself over Iraq by saying the intelligence justified the invasions and the inquiries proved it.