Samizdata

Andrew Sullivan has an absolutely barnstormer of a piece here about the British elections. It is often highly refreshing to read a perspective on the poll by a Brit living thousands of miles away after having spent the past two decades earning a living outside the UK. His analysis of what is wrong with the Tories, his brilliant skewering of our media, and his rendering of the LibDems and Labour, is spot on.

The Daily Mail’s print headline screamed “You gave him a bloody nose!” and the Sun snickered that Tony Blair had been given a “Kick in the Ballots”.

Excuse me? Blair wins a historic third term with a good sixty plus seat majority and this is being portrayed as something less than a major political triumph for the Labour party? If ever there was an instance of how the mainstream media has a remarkable talent for making an ass of itself, this is it. This was not a ‘vindication’ of the Tories (as suggested by the print edition of the Telegraph), it was just another confirmation that they have become utterly irrelevant. One way to see this is that Labour has pulled off a historic victory (which is an indisputable fact). Another way to look at this is that the Tories have suffered a historic defeat. That even after all these years they still cannot be accepted as a viable alternative shows that they are far worse historically speaking than any other British Tory party for a very long time indeed.

So I got the result I wanted. Sure I loath Labour’s ghastly regulatory statism and contempt for civil liberties but Michael Howard is now no longer leader of his party and the cabal around him which turned the Tories into Labour-Lite has been shown to be losers of quite some magnitude. Now maybe, just maybe, something better can come along as the scale of their failure starts to sink in.

In the comment section of my previous post on this blog, many people seemed to think I was urging ‘libertarians’ not to vote for the Conservative party because it was not the small government libertarian leaning party of my dreams. Well sure, but that is not who I had in mind. I was really not thinking about ‘libertarians’ at all when I urged people not to vote Tory, I was thinking about Tories. The reason I am delighted that millions of conservatives did not vote for Michael Howard was that the Tory party is not a conservative party and enough people realised that for the right result to happen. For as long as the Conservative party is peddling nothing more than the same old “give us your money for skoolzandhospitals” crap as Labour and the LibDems, they really should be shunned by millions of people who describe themselves as, well, conservative.

And that is exactly what happened.

Some brief news about the UK General Election.

With some 40 or so constituencies still to declare, ZaNu-Labour have (as expected) won a third term in office, though with a much reduced majority. Tony Blair looks rather chastened. The Conservatives have done rather better than I (or anybody else) had expected. Michael Howard looks rather pleased. The truly hideous Leninist-Democrats have gained a few seats but, fortunately, nowhere near as many as they were expecting. They are still in third place by some distance.

Oh and George Galloway is back in Parliament.

I will offer up some more thoughts later and as soon as I have some time to spare.

Hopefully the Tory party will get hammered at the polls today and take a giant leap towards the crisis they so richly deserve. As I have urged before, if you ever want to get a party which does not share the vast majority of its views with Labour, then for goodness sake do not reward their aiding and abetting of pervasive government by voting for the buggers. Do not hold your nose and vote for Michael Howard’s carnival of clowns because they are the less evil because they are nothing of the sort: they are the same evil with the added toxic characteristic of providing an illusion of choice.

If you are going to vote rather than do something useful with your day, and yet you want an end to the European Union’s takeover of British politics, a smaller state, lower taxes (rather than just ‘less tax increases’) and an end to the panopticon ID/database state (or even just any one of those), you will get none of them by voting Tory. If you cannot bring yourself to kick the voting habit altogether, then why not vote UKIP? At least that way you get to indulge your fetish for voting whilst at the same time annoying the chattering classes and not rewarding a collaborationist ‘opposition’.

Not that anyone would know it from reading this blog, but there is a General Election taking place here in Britain later today.

Of course, I cannot and would not presume to speak for any of my fellow contributors, but for my part, my hitherto silence on this ostensibly ‘big’ issue is due entirely to boredom. I suppose I could delve into my rhetorical box of tricks and rummage around to find some sound ideological justification for denouncing the whole process as illegitimate and antithetical to genuinely liberal ideas, but I simply cannot muster the enthusiasm to do so.

If there had been anything like a real debate in this campaign or anything resembling a challenge to the prevailing intellectual hegemony then I might have been moved to add my voice to the throng. But, as it is, I cannot recall any national election being so stultifyingly dull, so suffocatingly vapid, so determinedly anodyne and strictly-by-the-numbers that the task of making a difference is rather like trying to move mountains by simply shouting at them. Some battles are not worth fighting.

And the issues? Well, there are no issues. Instead there is one, universal promise, writ large in every syllable of every soundbite of every candidate. It is a promise, nay an earnest pledge, to hose down the public sector with money. To the extent that there is any debate at all, it is merely some sporadic bickering about how widely to open the valve and the direction in which it should be aimed. This is the only constant, the sole electoral standard and the only message (so orthodoxy holds) that the public wants to hear.

I cannot say for sure whether or not this is true. If the bleatings of the pundits are to believed then something like a half (or possibly just over a half) of eligible voters will trudge along to a voting booth tomorrow to endorse the ‘new boss’ and even among those dutiful citizens, I detect little passion or genuine commitment. They will go through the motions, more out of habit than conviction. The rest merely shrug with indifference and resignation. Not even the revelations that the process is shot through with fraud seems to have stirred any ripples.

This is such a strange place to live right now. A deep wellspring of tired cynicism with the same old, same old runs congruent with an abject fear of the unfamiliar. An apparently universal conviction that none of the candidates are going to improve any single persons life by so much as an iota is inexplicably coupled with a refusal to countenance any public acknowledgement that this, in fact, the case.

For what it is worth, I expect that the government will win the election and win it handsomely and things will just grind on pretty much as before. How long will this last? I cannot say. Maybe this is some temporary trough; a mere interregnum between great periods of flux and change. Or maybe it really is the ‘end of history’? It certainly feels like it.