and they’re off…
Not yet three weeks into the general election campaign and we’ve heard all manner of promise, pledge, assurance, commitment and guarantee. Claim has been met with counterclaim and we’ve been told falsehoods, fibs, myths, porkies and mis-speaks. Lies have been repeated with damn lies and verified by statistics. Nicholas Parsons will be spinning in his grave with the amount of hesitation, repetition and deviation we’ve had to endure. And there’ll be more to come, lots more and I’m loving every minute of it.
Popular opinion would have it that elections are all about the future. And it is, largely, but it’s also about the past. Contrary to Rishi’s view that we should view him on his own personal chequered track-record, next month’s general election must also be about holding the Conservatives to account for the colossal damage they have done to this wonderful country over the past fourteen years. No amount of yesterday’s bountiful manifesto bravado can excuse this legacy.
The Tories need to face the consequences of their actions. Pick any measure, and it tells the same bleak story. GDP, wage growth, public services, NHS waiting times, food-bank use, homelessness, mortgage payments, poverty-stricken families. Yes, I fully concede that both Covid and Ukraine have exacerbated the situation but blaming this for the entirety of our woes is to dodge the blame for their own decisions wrt social, environmental and economic policies. So much is broken that whole policy areas go ignored and unnoticed.
It began with Gideon Osborne’s austerity and Diamond Dave’s calling for a referendum merely to relieve the party’s UKIP headache. Saint Theresa promised us a hardcore Brexit she knew made no sense before Boris’s infantile solutions, conjured-up in a bus plastered with a #350m lie, exposed the truth we all knew. His subsequent shenanigans in office lead to the wrecking-ball of a smirking Liz Truss and the idiocy of a Rwandan immigration policy. And here we are.
Each and every one of those Prime Ministers have degraded everything they have touched, a party of King Midas’s in reverse. The pandemic revealed something admirable about the majority of us – a willingness to make individual sacrifices for the collective good – but the corrupt and immoral Tories have mocked us every step of the way. On Thursday July 4th, the Tories don’t deserve merely to lose, they deserve to be punished. Go to it.
