I have always said, not entirely jokingly, that I vote for a monkey if it had a Labour rosette on it. Now it turns out that I have actually been confronted with a choice that is not so far away from that scenario: the West of England metro mayoral election.
Even when I lived in Tony Benn’s constituency I voted Labour even though his simplistic slogans did not exactly chime with my more centre left leanings. Labour, in those days, had a huge problem with the hard left, but it never gained control of the reins of power. It was all right to vote for Benn, if only for the fact that he was a reasonably decent constituency MP. The Labour of 2017 is very different.
The Labour candidate for this post is Lesley Mansell who currently holds the prestigious parish council seat of Westfield and Peasedown St John and that’s the sum total of her qualifications for running an area of circa one million people including Bristol. This is itself would make it very difficult to vote Labour in the coming election because, despite my Labour affiliations (I remain a member for reasons I don’t quite understand), I do want someone in the job who I believe is capable of doing it. I am not sure that, for all her undoubted qualities in sorting out local planning applications and problems with dog mess, she is best positioned to represent me. But there is one additional problem with Ms Mansell: she is a Corbynista and I am not voting for a Corbynista for any position at all.
Oh my God, principles. They really do get in the way sometimes. I know I should bite the bullet and simply vote for Mansell because, well at least she might stand for some things I can agree with, but then at the same time she supports a leader who she must know, unless she is a complete idiot, is totally incompetent, devoid of any meaningful policies (Corbyn has positions, not policies) and could not be trusted to run a bath never mind a once serious political party. And that’s without his pro IRA, Hamas, Hezbollah affiliations and his lifelong history of voting against his own party, more often than David Cameron. If Corbyn is leading Labour to hell in a handcart, I cannot possibly climb on board. So I will not be voting Labour in the mayoral election, the first time I have not voted Labour in my entire life.
Looking at the sorry list of candidates, it looks like I will not be voting at all. I certainly won’t vote Tory or Ukip (obviously) and whilst I have Green sympathies, I could not vote for a party that would undoubtedly be as hostile to the motorist as they are. I suppose the only choice is Liberal Democrat, but I am afraid that sometimes I bear grudges and here I definitely do. The Tory government of 2010-2015, in which some Lib Dems had jobs, was one of the nastiest of my lifetime. The austerity they inflicted on the country, especially the weakest and poorest in society was enabled by the Lib Dems and I am not going to ever forgive them for inflicting huge tuition fees on students, even if they offer a full and genuine apology. I am not going to vote for a party that stood by and allowed the government to bring in the Bedroom Tax and allowed Iain Duncan Smith to conduct a wicked and brutal attack on the sick and disabled. That is that with the Lib Dems. I cannot vote for them, not even tactically to try and defeat the Tories.
This leaves me in the awful position of having to abstain in an election. There’s me, the lifelong enthusiastic supporter of democracy deciding to stay at home on election day, but I feel I have no choice.
In future, for so long as Labour is run by the basket case left, I will vote purely on the basis of who my Labour candidate is. If it’s a Corbynista, I will not vote for them. If it’s someone else, I will make a judgement as to whether they are any good. Only then will I look at the rest of the field before, inevitably, deciding to not vote.
This time my motto will be simple: don’t vote because it only encourages them.
