Yesterday's local council election and the European vote are going pretty much as I had feared - sheep-like voters are giving Labour a good old walloping as per instructions from the mainly Tory press. It's a lot like turkey's voting for Christmas of course but, heck let's not let political history and outcomes stand in the way of a good heckle shall we?
I was talking to a chum recently about politics - she reads the Mail and can't name a single member of the cabinet, when pressed she can't come up with any Tory policies either (there's a good reason for this though - they're aren't any) but she likes David Cameron. She says things like 'don't get me started on benefit scroungers' in total seriousness and thinks that the country has never been in a worse state than it is now. She genuinely believes that we need a change of government to sort it all out. Fine, but people much stupider than her get to vote; she has degree and a good job, she actually reads a paper that sometimes reports on politics, not just on Big Brother and big tits, she is caring and when you argue your point she listens. People who are deciding the fate of your mortgage and your livelihood are not necessarily as smart, or indeed nowhere near as smart. Be afraid, be very afraid.
We were out of the country for several years: one of the reasons we left was because we had a mortgage we could barely afford - largely because of the interest rates. The last Tory government were responsible for interest rates climbing into double figures, and if you have a mortgage that is three times your income that is hard. So we voted in the 1997 election and buggered off, relieved that we no longer had to worry about all that.
The Labour party meanwhile set about fixing the country - they increased public spending, made the country prosperous, got us talking to the rest of Europe and tried to fix crime and poverty. They haven't succeeded of course because Rome wasn't built in a day and neither of these issues has any easy or voter friendly solutions: crime is probably the product of inequality, poverty is the product of capitalism. But we came home to a country that seemed a lot happier with itself - although the press seemed to be getting restless...
And then the banking system fell apart: Brown stepped up, and to more or less world-wide acclaim starting coming up with solutions - you can see the results of this fix already with a few tiny green shoots. Then came the expenses row - orchestrated by tax evaders (Telegraph owners,the Barclay brothers don't bother with tax, they live in the Channel islands and give their address as Monaco) and happily seized upon by the Tories as somehow a problem with the Labour party (although their MP's happily fleeced the country too).
The result is this - you and I are now looking at rule by a party led by an old Etonian and designed to promote the values of capitalism - welfare issues are much less of an issue than getting and spending. Well don't say I didn't warn you.