… says Dave Osler as he signs off his latest blog post. He’s just witnessed young people screaming, “Labour Labour Labour, Out Out Out!” outside their conference hall and had, it seems, a startling moment of clarity.
Labour returned to power in 1997 based on a promise not to be typical old Tax and Spend Labour (fail), that they would remain firmly in control of the trade unions (fail) and they’d keep the support of the Working Classes by taking a tough new stance on Law and Order (fail).
They reasoned, correctly, that so long as they didn’t do anything mad and fed the Sun and Mail lots of socially conservative stuff they’d be able to get away with epic redistribution and a huge increase in power and security for the people they like.
Combine that with a charismatic and popular leader, one that looked, smelt and sounded much more like a Tory than a genuine Labour politicians, they had a winning combination – a Labour Party that was vaguely more tolerable to the British People than the Tories.
Except, really, when you think about it, massively increasing the power of the state, combined with a massive clamp down on civil liberties whilst punishing their unfavoured groups to reward the favoured is… well…. it’s all a bit fascist, isn’t it? I have extreme reservations about this tendency towards segregating muslim children, and the reprehensible and disgusting abuse of illegal immigrants for party political purposes is sickening.
But it doesn’t stop there: In caring for us, Labour have gone from Nanny State to the Bully State (Dick Puddlecote covers this in a brilliant post here). Call me old fashioned, but the state trying to dictate to me how I should live my life – what I should eat, whether or not I’m allowed to smoke, or drink, what I can say, what I can think…. well I resent that. Again, it’s just a wee bit fascist for my tastes. Authoritarian doesn’t really seem to capture that sense of outrage and frustration people feel when a Government behaves like it’s got it in for you. They’ve created a hostile, malicious, suspicious country full of jealousy, envy, anger and hatred, winners and losers at each other’s throats because they know the only difference is that one’s got the Government on their side and the other’s got the Government actively working against them.
If one good thing has come out of Labour’s 12 years in power it’s what Dave’s original post was all about. It’s the fact that actions speak louder than words, and kids who’ve grown up under Labour don’t see them as a party of the poor, or even of the working class. They’re exactly what they always were: The party of the trade unions and the special interest pressure groups, and a pretty meritless, calculating, authoritarian one at that.
The trick is to ask yourself, who are the big winners under Labour, and who are the big losers? The winners, in my opinion, are the heavily unionised public sector workers. The losers are the private sector and pretty much everyone else.
It feels like… well, you’ve invited a friend to stay with you, and at first it’s fine – they’re helping with the washing up, they do shopping and you’re thinking, hey – this isn’t bad. Then 10 years later they’re still here, except now they’re holding all the things they do for you over your head in order to boss everyone around – they get to decide what to watch on telly, they decide when you’re allowed to use the internet, they decide what films you can and can’t watch, they decide what food and drink you can bring into your house and you start thinking… you know what? Wish I hadn’t let that little prick do the shopping all those years.
That’s what it’s like.
