Millions of people will be hanging on my every word in order to find out how they should vote in Thursday’s election. They will want clarity, they will want certainty, they will want it writ large: who should I vote for and why? None of this is true, but never mind. Here, then, is my cut out and keep guide to the General Election.
First of all, you should definitely vote. People died in order for you to vote, not least those who gave their lives in the two not-so-great wars of the twentieth century.
Secondly, you then need to decide what and who you want from the next government.
Thirdly, forget secondly because this election could well be about what you want least.
I’ll start with the easy bit. If you support the following, then vote Conservative:
- An habitual liar as prime minister, someone who lies, lies and then lies again, whether it’s to his partner or to the Queen. Boris Johnson is a liar.
- The end of the NHS.
- The end of the BBC.
- The hardest possible rupture with Europe.
- The destruction of the civil service.
- The creation of a small state, low tax, deregulated country, a kind of European Singapore.
- The loss of basic human rights.
- The politicisation of the judiciary.
- The break up of the UK.
- There is loads more stuff along these lines, all horrible.
If you don’t support any of this, then vote tactically. For many of you, this will be difficult, even painful. It certainly was for me, having to vote for a distant relation of the Labour Party I used to belong to, led by a clueless old man who has never had an original idea in his life, who has always been on the wrong side of history and who has a shedload of seriously unpleasant friends, such as tyrants and terrorists. I did so for two specific reasons:
- I firmly believe that the Labour Party led by Jeremy Corbyn cannot win this election. I believe I am taking a minor gamble voting for him.
- A hard right government led by Johnson will be a disaster for this country.
Where Labour cannot win, then vote Lib Dem or whoever pro EU party is most likely to challenge the Tories. The Lib Dems have a grim record of government with David Cameron’s horrendous austerity government of 2010 to 2015. They seemed to have learned their lesson, although they admitted it far too late in the campaign, and they are better in every single way than the Tories.
I hope we can get another hung parliament after which those of us from the mainstream and centre left in Labour can make one major push to get rid of the hard left who have captured its core. This will be a fight to the death. Win and we save the Labour Party. Lose and it sails off into the political sunset, never to return.
What we cannot allow is to let loose a majority hard right Conservative government led by a liar, a shyster, a huckster and a very nasty piece of work called Boris Johnson.
The stakes could not be higher. This time we need to vote to stop what we don’t want rather than for what we do want. And if we succeed, we must work to ensure we never end up here again.
Vote tactically.
