Vote as if you have a gun pointed at someone’s head.
13 Tzameti
I was recently made aware, some people voted Tory in the 2019 general election, to send a message to Labour; they weren’t happy with the “radicle” agenda of Jeremy Corbyn.
Voting tactically in 2019 has backfired in the most vicious way possible.
We now have 126 thousand deaths from COVID. A no deal “deal” exiting the European Union that’s tanking the economy, and abandoning the Good Friday Agreement, trashing thirty years of peace in Northern Ireland. We have a government intent on making protesting illegal, while at the same time handing lucrative PPE contracts to friends and donors to the Conservative Party. At best they’re hypocritical, at worst corrupt.
My approach to voting is simple. Vote as if you have a gun pointed at someone’s head. Are you willing to pull that policy trigger? Tory policies kill. Ten years of austerity have proven that. The only message anyone sends by voting Tory is you agree with Tory policies, and voting Tory tells me “I’m happy to kill”.
Even if you choose to criticise the Labour Party’s manifesto as ridiculously expensive, which it’s not. Just watch the clip below from BBC Newsnight. “It would basically bring us still to levels that are lower than France, Norway, and Sweden.”
We pride ourselves on being the fifth largest economy in the world. Why can’t we afford it? The Labour Party’s manifesto has something the other parties won’t offer. A vision for the future, a vision that offers hope.
This manifesto gives hope to all of us who have been bled dry by this huge vampiric pyramid scheme of neoliberalism. It offers the possibility that things might get better, instead of predictably worse.
“Even if you just look at the total amount that Labour currently wants to increase the spending, it would basically bring us still to levels that are lower than France, Norway, and Sweden.”
I agree with Tom Quinn’s analysis in The Conversation about the Independent Group, their “likely endpoint is another merger” with the other centrists party, the Liberal Democrats. In the same way as the SDP merged with the Liberal Party in the 1980’s, it’s the logical outcome of a binary political system.
I voted to remain, and Chuka Umunna is my MP, so theoretically I should vote for his pro European platform, and return him to Parliament at the next election. I’m not sure I will. For me the only way forward is the solution offered by the Labour Party. We leave the European Union but maintain a strong trading partnership, that includes free movement, and regulation parity.
Labour and Corbyn have been criticised for their stand, accused of propping up right-wing Tories. I don’t think that’s what is happening. I think Corby is using our exit of the European Union as a way to further the manifesto promises of the last election.
I still think leaving the European Union is an act of social and economic madness, playing Russian roulette with five rounds in the six shot cylinder. The chances of us emerging alive on the other side are slim, but I am equally disturbed by the neoliberalism of European Union.
Two things come to mind when I think neoliberalism. The first is Thatcherism, a system of “dog in a manger” economics, obsessed with the vagaries of the market and privatisation, and a property owning democracy that either revels in Boomtown, or sleeps rough when the economy hits the skids.
The second thing that comes to mind is something said by Ken Loach. The European Union is a club for bosses. It may offer workers rights, minimum safety standards for consumer goods, free movement of goods, services, and of course workers, but all of those benefits are designed as much to enrich the wealth of the bosses, as mollify its citizens
Given a choice between a revolver with five rounds in the chamber, and cheaper food, I’m going to choose cheaper food. But if our food is going to be more expensive, perhaps that can be offset by cheaper utility bills, and cheaper transportation, when those industries are nationalised under a Labour government.
What strikes me is how much The Conservative Party has been given. It’s far more than any other political party, double contributions to The Labour Party. It’s no surprise that Labour gets much of its funding from the unions. Neither is it a surprise the wealthiest few donate millions to The Conservative Party.
In the interests of the many, I donated to the Labour party.
I, like many, was horrified by the recent election result which brought another Conservative government to power. The day after the election someone asked me if I was disappointed. National Health Service gone. Affordable housing gone. Welfare gone. As far as I can tell austerity is an excuse to dismantle the welfare state, and I can’t believe people voted for the worst version of it. Too right I was disappointed.
The person who asked the question replied to my predictions with the ever-so slightly patronising “we’ll see”. This from someone who has never really had it tough. I don’t mean “can’t decide which holiday to go on” tough. I mean “can’t feed your kids” tough. How do I know they’ve never had it tough? I once overheard them, in a conversation about how hard it is to find somewhere to live in London, say “I just pick up the phone, tell them how much I earn, and they give me what I want”.
That’s not unusual, it presumes because others haven’t achieved financial success they’re weak or lazy. This attitude is all too common. It’s a soulless attitude that takes no account of personal circumstances, or the hardships most people go though just to survive. In short, it’s an egocentric view of the world, at the core of a model of rampant self-interest, this nation was infected with since Thatcher.
For me it’s an attitude implicit in the ever-so slightly patronising coverage of Jeremy Corbyn. I, like most people, had never heard of Jeremy Corbyn before the recent Labour leadership campaign, but I keep finding things that make me say “this guy is interesting”. He seems to be offering a genuine, straight talking, alternative to rampant self-interest at the core of the current social and political landscape, an attitude that puts the values and interests of the very few at the top of this vast pyramid scheme we call capitalism.
This is just a small example of what I mean when I say “the ever-so slightly patronising coverage of Jeremy Corbyn”.
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