Voting Labour Is Moronic

I can sort of see why people would want to vote Tory, Liberal Democrat, UKIP, Green – hell, even the BNP. Personally, I would struggle to vote for any of those knobheads – especially the last in the list. But I sort of get it. Yet I really cannot understand why anyone would want to vote Labour.

Sure, I understand that some people will vote for Labour because they have always voted Labour. As far as I am concerned, voting for a party based on the same sort of allegiance that you might show to a failing football team is pretty dumb. But my thirty years of existence on this planet has shown that people are really dumb consistently.

But is the notion of voting Labour because you always have done actually any more stupid than some of the other reasons we are given for putting your cross in the Labour box at the next election? Let’s take a look at some of the typical reasons for voting for our terrible, incumbent government:

Labour saved the economy

No, they decimated it and then spent billions of dollars trying to provoke a recovery that was going to happen anyway. It is a bit like wanting God to be Prime Minister because he saved the economy – it is total nonsense.

Labour will save the fox-hunting ban

This may be true, but I’ve yet to be convinced that repealing the fox-hunting ban is going to be the first priority of any incoming Tory administration. But let’s get some perspective here – on the one hand, you have a Tory party who may revoke a ban on hunting with dogs. On the other, you have a Labour party responsible for the deaths of hundreds of British troops and the deaths of thousands of others through their unflinching backing of one of the most egregious US Presidents in history.

I find fox-hunting repugnant, but on balance I find war-mongering far, far worse.

Only the Labour Party can stop the Tories

This may be true, but my gut response is to wonder just what Labour supporters think the Tories are going to do. Because here’s the truth of recent political history in this country. Just as the success of the Tories in the 1980’s and early 1990’s broke the ideological spirit of the Labour party, so the unfathomable success of the grinning homunculus broke the ideological spirit of the Tories. The Tories and the Labour aren’t the same, but they are far from radically different either. You can tell by the way in which they slavishly follow each other, and relentlessly vie for the supposed centre ground of British politics. The Tories were going to follow Labour’s spending plans; now the opposite seems to be happening.

Put simply, so what if the Tories are going to have to cut spending? The Labour party are going to have to do exactly the same thing.

The Labour Party are the only alternative for left-wing voters

Well, ignoring the fact that the traditional left-right divide is about as relevant for modern times as Amstrad home computers and Chesney Hawkes, I’d also question the extent to which the Labour Party is actually left-wing, even in the traditional sense. The first point would be the Iraq War, but I’ve already touched on that. So let’s look at some of the other ways in which the Labour party has shown itself to be anything other than left-wing:

• The Banking Bail-Out: There is nothing left-wing or socialist about the government choosing to bail out failed banks. Nothing at all. Yeah, the Labour party is now trying to bash the bankers. Great, yeah. Very left-wing. Very fucking populist. And something that would be 200% more convincing if the Labour party hadn’t spent so much money on propping up their pet fucking banks. Why is the Labour party having to make spending cuts? Because it spent billions trying to nationalise the banking sector at the worst time possible. How very left-wing.

• The Ongoing Attack on Civil Liberties: Once upon a time, being left-wing was about trying to increase freedom. Now it is about trying to reduce freedom as much as possible. The Labour government has attempted to bring in ID cards, a longer period of detention without charge, and ignores the advice of experts when it comes to drug legislation. And that is quite literally the just the tip of the iceberg. There is nothing left-wing about that. Unless for you left-wing means Stalinist.

• The Poor: The Labour party talks a lot about social mobility, but in the final analysis they have done remarkably little to help the poor in this country. The reason is obvious – they get the votes of the poor anyway. Why would they pursue policies to help the poor when they know that if those people vote, they get those votes anyway? Don’t believe me? Look at the debacle over the 10p tax rate. How socialist to shaft the poor.

To recap, I think it is moronic to vote for a party because you always have voted for them. But I think voting Labour for any of those reasons mentioned above is equally moronic. In fact, I cannot think of one good reason to vote Labour. Voting Labour this year would be a dumb thing to do. So guess what?

Don’t do it.