Some of the worst nights of my life have taken place in early May — Margaret Thatcher’s first election victory on May 3, 1979 (when I was too young to even vote), and the 2010 election, on May 6, 2010, which brought a Tory-led coalition government, led by David Cameron, to power.

There were other dreadful nights, on or around May — the Tory victories on June 9, 1983, June 11, 1987 and April 9, 1992 — and after the anti-Tory euphoria of Tony Blair’s victory wore off, following New Labour’s landslide victory on May 1, 1997, the reality of a New Labour Britain was of course a huge disappointment, as the party embarked on its own neo-liberal trajectory, and the country became host to a housing price casino that was a poor substitute for an actual functioning economy — and, in 2003, also became the home of an illegal warmonger.

As a result, the rest of New Labour’s victories — on June 7, 2001 and May 5, 2005 — were also disappointing, as the party failed to remember what it was supposed to be, and continued, instead, as a general betrayer of its founding values. On those occasions, however, the disappointment in a Labour victory was, pragmatically, offset by slim gratitude that at least the Tories weren’t back in. Read the rest of this entry »

On the eve of Britain’s General Election, I wanted to make sure that I expressed my hope that anyone who can will vote to keep the Tories out — for the reasons I have been pointing out since they came to power in 2010: their disdain for the poor, the ill, the unemployed and the disabled; their unparalleled obsession with destroying the state provision of services; and their dedication to enriching the already rich, all carried out under a false claim that we need savage austerity, a false claim that has repeatedly been exposed by competent economists as an ideologically-driven madness that is enormously damaging to the economy.

My archive of articles about the Tories’ crimes since May 2010 (225 articles to date) is here, under the unambiguous heading, “Battle for Britain: Fighting the Coalition Government’s Vile Ideology,” and if you still have any doubts about my position, please listen to “Tory Bullshit Blues,” the free song I recently made available on Soundcloud, by my band The Four Fathers.

The worst outcome after the election would be for the Tories to be back in power with the support of the Liberal Democrats, who will be given a kicking at the polls for their support of the Tories for the last five years, but who will limp on electorally. I can’t even bear to think about the Tories continuing to be in charge of the country, to be honest, but if it does happen I can only hope that ordinary people will — eventually — rise up in disgust and will not continue to embrace their oppressors as though punishment is something they deserve (a legacy of Puritanism and the class system), or in the futile hope — largely, it seems, successfully imported from the US in recent decades — that they too may one day be rich, when, of course, given the current fashion for rich people to be as greedy as possible, they would not want to pay any of their wealth in tax to ensure the smooth running of society as a whole. Read the rest of this entry »