Imagine a Tory government. This government does what Tories do: it privatises what it can, for instance, then invites private companies into the public sector, paying them with assets that belonged to schools and hospitals. The government cuts income tax and corporation tax; it passes a raft of illiberal social legislation; it makes it more expensive to go to university and harder to claim unemployment benefit. (It also extends licensing hours, but I suppose everyone's got to have one good idea.)
Now imagine that, after nearly two decades, this government is replaced. Then imagine that the new government maintains and extends every one of the policies I've just described. Imagine that, after four years, it asks for a mandate to continue along the same lines, taking policies introduced by the Tories further than the Tories ever dreamed. Finally, imagine that millions of loyal Labour voters - people who stood by the Labour Party through the Thatcher years, who voted Labour under Smith and Kinnock and Foot - go out and vote for this government, giving it another four years in power.
Then stop imagining, because that's what's going to happen on Thursday.
It's a frightening prospect. So how did it happen - how did we get here? For me, the answer's provided by two quotations, one from 1997 and one from 2000. The morning after the last election, Tony Blair announced: "We were elected as New Labour and we intend to govern as New Labour." Nobody could say he hasn't delivered on that promise. Then last year, a current affairs programme interviewed a London Labour Party member and asked him why he was intending to vote for Frank Dobson as Mayor. He replied, "I'm Labour through and through - I'd vote for a donkey with a red rosette."
Tony Blair - and the ten or twenty other people who run New Labour - can be accused of many things, but stupidity isn't one of them. I don't believe for a minute that they really think they were "elected as new Labour". Some of the new votes the Labour Party gained in 1997 may have come from believers in New Labour, but most of them came from people who were simply sick of the Tories - sick of Tory privatisations, Tory flag-waving and Tory sleaze. (Those people have their own reasons to be disappointed with this government, but that's by the way.) In any case, the bulk of the Labour vote in 1997 came from people who had always voted Labour, and weren't about to change just because the leadership had started saying some strange things. And the leadership knowingly exploited those people's support, in order to carry out policies diametrically opposed to what the Labour Party had always stood for. Not to put too fine a point on it, they traded on Labour loyalty in order to drive through Tory policies. I believe this is disgraceful. I believe it should stop; and I believe we can help to stop it.
Speaking as one long-time Labour voter to another, my advice is simple: don't vote Labour on Thursday. I'm not saying the Labour Party is a lost cause: on the contrary, there are many Labour Party members who still believe in "old Labour" values, not to mention a few good MPs. Ultimately, I hope we'll see the New Labour clique dislodged from the positions they occupy, and the Labour Party can be turned back into a party which stands for social justice, public services, democracy and civil liberties. But that's a long-term project. Right now we need to recognise that, in one sense, Tony Blair is correct: every Labour vote is a vote for New Labour, privatisation, tuition fees and all. Right now, we need to jump ship.
If there's any alternative, don't vote Labour. Read the party literature and ask yourself, honestly, which candidate comes closest to the principles you believe in. There's plenty of room to the left of Labour; even the Liberal Democrats are looking like Labour's left-wing opposition these days. And that's without mentioning the nationalist parties, the Greens and the parties with Socialist in their names.
Use your vote wisely: it'd be stupid not to vote, and helping elect a Tory would be crazy. But don't vote Labour if you can help it. It's not the party we used to know; it's been taken over from above. The people responsible know what they've done. It's time to tell them that we know it too.
Phil Edwards, 5th June 2001
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