So who do we vote for when the good times are over and won’t ever come back?
Most of us don’t have party political allegiances. The shadows cast by the worst decisions of previous and current Prime Ministers tend to inform our decisions at the ballot box, and because some pretty appalling policies have been inflicted on us down the years by both Labour and the Conservatives, we spend a lot of our time at a crossroads of opinion subject to movement caused by the vagaries of the media as much as by our own experiences and anything the latest leaders do or say.
The Liberal Democrats tend to mop up some of the disaffected and discontented, although they’ve supported the current government so many times we’d be forgiven for thinking they’re an even paler shade of red than the New Labour project that saw socialism’s core values excised under Tony Blair. The unbridled global free market has led to or exasperated global problems—the credit crunch, the food crisis, runaway global warming—but right now Gordon Brown is getting in the neck as the grand bogeyman presiding over our imminent leap into recession or even a second great depression. But to be fair, while we can blame Brown’s party for many things—erosion of our civil liberties, unquestioning support of George Bush, the decision to attack and occupy Iraq—we can’t blame them for everything.
tags: Big Brother, civil liberties, Conservatives, database state, David Cameron, elections, environment, food crisis, free market, global warming, Gordon Brown, ID cards, Labour, Liberal Democrats, politics, sustainability, Tony Blair
