Wrecking the party?

It is going to come up again and again over the next few months and years, so I thought I may as well address it now. There are going to be claims that people like myself - who are (ex)Tories but deeply dis-satisfied with the Cameron leadership - are going to wreck Cameron's chances of seizing Number 10 from the clutches of Gordon Brown.

Well, bollocks, as far as I am concerned.

There are a number of different points I would make to that claim. First of all, a Cameron victory is by no means certain. Owing to the massive electoral mountain Cameron will have to climb an outright Conservative victory is highly unlikely, even given the current poll lead he has over our visually challenged Chancellor. If Cameron does win a minority victory (and let's not forget there is a real difference between what people tell pollsters and what they actually do in a voting booth) then he will have to form an alliance with Ming The Merciful's Lib Dems - and coalition governments in this country just plain don't work. So for all of you shouting "go, go Cameron!" and imagining our pudgy faced friend sweeping into Number 10 after the next election, I would advise a hint of caution.

Furthermore, my vote is largely irrelevant. I live in a constituency that is Conservative through and through and the chance of my vote allowing anyone else to get in is, frankly, nonsense. I know we are talking about more than just my vote here, and about what would happen if lots of people like me changed their votes. But I maintain that my vote is not going to change the course of the next election. I will still vote, but am under no illusions that my constituency will return the Conservative candidate regardless of how I vote.

But thirdly, and most crucially, there is the argument that anyone like myself, who is right wing but doesn't vote Tory, will be electing by default a further Labour administration. This is just so much horseshite. Because my counter-argument is simple - there is no point in electing a Tory party that is just a photo-copy of the Blair administration. Which, I am sorry to say, the Conservative Party under Cameron are.

I am tired of hearing about how the Conservatives are the best we have got, or how politics is the art of the possible. Bollocks. This country has elected radical governments before (see Attlee and Thacther) and those radical governments are the ones, regardless of whether you think their policies were right or wrong, who actually managed to acheive something. Crazy when you think about it, but there was a time when political parties actually aspired to something other than good headlines and a nice photo opportunity. The fact that Blair has spent the last ten years terrified of moving from the middle ground - and in doing so has terrified Cameron into exactly the same position - is no reason for us to accept this post-Blair consensus that offers nothing other than more of the same to the British people.

Here is the brutal truth - it doesn't make a blind bit of fucking difference to me if Labour win the next election over a Conservative Party that is indistinguishable from that Labour party. I don't care whether it is Labour, Conservatives, Liberal fucking Democrats or even the bloody Monster Raving Looney Party in power. It is not the name of the party in government that matters to me. It is the ideas and policies of that government that matter. Heath was elected as a Conservative Prime Minister. Great! The Tories in power - except, as must be obvious too all bar the politically myopic, Heath was to the left of Blair. It is the policies that matter, not the party.

I've said before but I'll repeat it here again - there is no point in winning power if you have abandoned the ideas and policies that made you seek power in the first place. I reject the idea that politics should be achieving power to the detriment of everything else outright - and, sadly, this seems to be the guiding idea of both Cameron and Blair.

By voting for someone else at the next election it won't be me wrecking the party for Cameron. It will Cameron wrecking the party for himself, by forgetting that he is a Conservative and that the valid, workable ideas for improving this country actually come from the right of the political spectrum.