Monthly Archives: June 2017

Election

I’ll be thinking about a lot of things, no doubt, as I stroll to the polling station tomorrow.

Perhaps I’ll try to imagine a politician who can’t lead his own MPs trying to lead our country. A man who didn’t have the personal dignity to resign when they passed a vote of no confidence in his “leadership”.

Or maybe I’ll wonder what a £10 minimum wage, increased corporation tax and uncontrolled immigration in tandem with massive giveaway public spending would do to our economy and society.

Perhaps I’ll think about what it would be like to have a Chancellor of the Exchequer who, like his leader, supported terrorist methods against his own country for decades, praising the “bombs and bullets” that killed British civilians and service personnel. A self-declared Marxist who carries a copy of Mao’s ‘Little Red Book’.

Perhaps I’ll wonder why a man so lauded for his supposed integrity in some parts didn’t have the honesty to say whether we’d leave the EU if he were to become Prime Minister, despite being asked five times in the same interview.

I might be asking myself how much damage a newly-enboldened trade union movement with a government in its pocket could do to British industry and commerce, and how many jobs their disruption and militancy might send abroad.

Maybe I’ll remember the times when all the public services were nationalised under the last socialist government, when there was no competition for your custom and no-one was allowed to sell you a telephone.

Perhaps I’ll spare a thought for the people of Venezuela, a country that Jeremy Corbyn congratulated on finding a “better way of doing things” that led to 800% inflation and hungry people queuing outside supermarkets with empty shelves.

Or I might wonder how a politician who rushes to condemn any military action by his own country somehow hasn’t found the time yet to condemn an attempt to blow up the British cabinet that happened over three decades ago.

I might muse on the stupidity of at least two party leaders declaring that they wouldn’t have the courage to walk away from a bad Brexit deal. With a negotiating position like that, a bad deal is exactly what they’d get, of course.

I’ll reflect, possibly, on socialism’s track record of failure everywhere it has been tried – causing misery for the many, not just the few. Always.

Maybe I’ll think about our nuclear deterrent. Labour’s leader has already told us, and indeed our potential enemies, that he’d never use it. Yet his manifesto has a commitment to spend billions on renewing Trident, purely to appease his backbenchers.

Perhaps I’ll shake my head, thinking how easy it was for an extremist, swivel-eyed reactionary fringe to take over a mainstream political party. Perhaps I’ll wonder what they might do if they took control of the country whose traditions they detest. What restrictions on a free press they might impose. What measures they might put in place to subvert the democratic process, to prevent themselves ever from being dislodged. What might happen to the people of the Falkland Islands, or the unionist community in Northern Ireland. Or Gibraltar.

But most of all, I’ll be thinking about the least advantaged in our society. People who depend on the NHS, for example. The sick, poor and vulnerable. People who cannot afford to depend on a society broken by socialism.

For them above all, I will vote Conservative.