Like many people, I suppose, I was quite excited when after the Thatcher/Major misery years, Labour finally took over under Blair. I hadn't voted for them (I generlaly vote for an MP not a party and there were good other candidates both Lib Dem and Green in my area) but I wished them well - as fellow travellers with apparently at least some common goals.
Ha. That was a gross, baroque and grotesque misunderstanding.
We now have a worse divide between rich and poor, we have used ill-gotten gains to boost the NHS and higher education, but the root cause of ill-health and societal ills (poverty, ignorance)are wosened because of the divide.
The underlying model of the economy was even more extreme laissez-faire free market than under Thatcher. This is now laid bare in all its stupidity, but noone is actually revisiting the alternatives or coming up with any novel approaches.
But there's worse.
Without any real justification, fundamental rights have been massively eroded by these idiots. Under Elizabeth the first and during the 2nd world war, the existing habeus corpus and right to not be held without charge was sufficient, but for obscure and ill-argued reasons, the UK now has one of the worst systems in the so-called civilized world of weeks of detention without trial.
The same sort of stupid technophobic and illogical thinking has led to a plethora of tiny right-erosions including annoying things like the digital economy bill and acts of moronic proportions like the loss of private data through criminal (well it ought to be) incompetence in government agency handling - despite this, a constant push to more and more centralisation of data and control.
We colluded with the CIA in torture - not only unethical, but counter-productive since it lends our enemies an actual justification (see under just war)
We continue to contribute to an unjust war in Iraq, and a pointless war in Afghanistan.
The list goes on and on, and just gets very depressing.
The Tories represent no alternative whatsover - their economic ideas are pathetic (see the recent chancellors-in-waiting debate on TV for how daft they are). They are clueless on class, and irrelevant on Europe.
I'd encourage people to vote with their conscience - we might gt a hung parliament, that might lead to a change in the voting system which might give a chance to some fresh blood to work its way into the moribund system.
We need some massive overhauling in society, economics and environment - none of the main parties has the ability or structure to tackle any of these other from the tired old postures of the past.
Time to die.
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