They were elected as New Labour, and they promised to govern as New Labour.
And yet they have done exactly what Old Labour have always done: bankrupted the country.
And the man responsible for a decade of economic inefficiency and fiscal incompetence as Chancellor of the Exchequer is now Her Majesty’s First Lord of the Treasury.
He was never elected as Prime Minister: he is distrusted by the majority of the nation, criticised by his own Chancellor, loathed by his own ministers and despised by many of his backbenchers.
This Labour Government took us to war on a false premise; has replaced Cabinet government with a politburo; diminished democracy; marginalised Parliament; taken in three million immigrants; saddled us with recession and soaring unemployment; given us the highest youth unemployment in history; eroded our liberties; abolished the right to trial by jury; raped the Constitution; politicised the civil service; sold off our gold reserves at the bottom of the market; raided our pensions; subjected us to the Lisbon Treaty; relegated us from 7th to 24th in international maths and literacy rankings; increased pensioner poverty; increased inequality; caused fascists to be elected to Brussels; massively increased our tax burden; imposed an incredible 5000 new laws; created an authoritarian state and thoroughly debased our politics.
After 13 long years of extravagant spending, sinister social engineering, welfare expansion, uncontrolled immigration, endless fiddling with the electoral system, unparalleled electoral fraud, grotesque state encroachment into private lives and personal affairs and now a devalued currency, we have what must be the most stunningly incompetent government in the history of the United Kingdom (and God knows there are quite a few to choose from), and the most ideologically illiberal, oppressive and anti-Christian in centuries.You would think the Conservative Party would be on course for an electoral landslide.
Of course, polls can be notoriously unreliable and are subject to trivial whims and sometimes inexplicable volatilities. A year ago, the Party was on course for a resounding victory. Polls were consistently showing a 10-point lead over Labour, and did so for a convincing period of time.
Then it went down to 6.
And last weekend is was 2.
And God knows what it is at the moment.
But wherever the swingometer is presently pointing, whatever wafer-thin majority the most optimistic polls suggest the Conservatives might win after the votes are cast, there is no security at all that it will stay there.
If recent polls are to be believed, we appear to be on course for a hung parliament, a dead heat, a score draw in which David Cameron might just or just might not form the largest party.
How can this be?
David Cameron was the future, once.
What is there to prefer in Gordon Brown? What is remotely attractive about voting for another 5 years (FIVE YEARS) of Peter Mandelson, Ed Balls and Harpy Hormone?Cranmer beseeches the electorate, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible you may be mistaken.
New Labour have abandoned their Christian foundations; they have cast aside all that may ever have been true, noble and good and supplanted it with duplicity, avarice and the stench of sleaze. Their principles have been shredded, and their sense of righteous morality pulped and recycled as an idol to every god in the firmament but the One who is known. Labour have become the party of war, the party of torture, the party of exploitation and the party of deception. They reward the thieves and fraudsters with ‘rights’ while penalising the law-abiding and responsible. As former Labour MP Bryan Gould observes: Labour’s achievements ‘have been molehills, judged against the towering peaks scaled by New Labour in its rejection not only of Labour, but of any decent and civilised values’.
New Labour has ceased to be civilised, for they have no clear vision of the meaning of this civility. It is no longer good, for it has lost sight of the common good by inflicting us with a plethora of uncommon relativist goods. This recession may be global, but it is New Labour’s fault that the United Kingdom is the worst place nation in the western world to cope with its effects. They have become the embodiment of that for which it always despised the Conservatives: it is now the undoubted party of unemployment, recession, inflation, and poverty.
Faith is being sure of what you hope for and certain of what you do not see.
It is difficult to have faith in a Conservative victory when the hope is totally dependent on the ‘marginal seat strategy’ which most certainly exists but is equally certainly unseen.
Or at least the strategy is given no particular credence by opinion pollsters.
But if it be true that elections are won and lost not by ‘national swings’ or by parties throwing money at all constituencies but instead by the very few key marginal seats which most easily change hands, why do opinion polls focus on the national picture when the outcome is more accurately determined in the electoral microcosm?
Why are pollsters not providing us principally with the results in those seats where there will be a real contest; where Lord Ashcroft has been pumping millions of pounds?
Psephology aside, the Conservative Party needs to mend some fences with their ‘Turnip Taliban’, the ‘dinosaurs’ and their ‘backwoodsmen’.
It is one thing to reach out to the ‘middle ground’, but quite another to do it at the expense of one’s core vote. The Party leadership might just consider that these turnips, dinosaurs and backwoodsmen are not all out-of-touch, anachronistic eccentrics, but intelligent and discerning individuals possessing of more conservative philosophy in their little fingers than some of the Party’s key strategists appear to manifest in their entire beings. Swing voters aside, those who have consistently and unwaveringly voted for the Conservative Party have done so because they are conservatives. They have the innate intelligence to see beyond the superficial, anodyne and banal. Their notion of diversity is more than skin deep: it is not dependent on gender, ethnicity, sexuality or disability, but on profession, achievement, religion, philosophy and worldview. The shifting sands of a nebulous and platitudinous ecumenical ‘broad appeal’ are no substitute for the rock of the ‘broad church’ laity.
Not least because all attempts by a centralist cabal of Notting Hill clerics to re-build the broad church upon a foundation of shifting sand will have the inevitable consequences.
