It’s up to you, shiraz quaffer

Good afternoon, campers. It’s Jamie off Blood & Treasure here, posting at the kind invitation of the management who would additionally like to inform you that there’s dirt for dinner and you’re not invited. Anyway, here’s a little adress dedicated to all you pseuds out there.

Reasons for Shiraz quaffers to vote against Labour: one and two.

Okay, Shiraz quaffers, so you gave in to the bullying and put your cross by the natural party of permanent government. You had no choice, you were told: they owned your vote. The fact that you had it to exercise was simply a privilege and exercising it the wrong way would simply be an act of ingratitude. So you went along.

It’s May 6. How do you feel? Not so good, maybe. Back in ’97 you were still up for Portillo. Last night you stuck around till maybe 1 o’clock. And you only lasted that long because you were secretly hoping that other people would do what you were afraid to do, and you’d see a couple of Lib Dem victories.

Still, never mind, eh ? At least you haven’t got that Michael Howard. You’ve got that Tony Blair instead. Everyone says he’s going to go in a couple of years. Then you’ll have that Gordon Brown. Somehow the prospect doesn’t fill you with joy. It’s like asking for a Christmas present in July. Come November, you don’t want it anymore and can’t think why you asked for it in the first place, but everyone knows it’s what you want so it’s what you’re going to get.

Or maybe not. Tony Blair is a massively popular leader and there’s nothing to prevent him going on for as long as he wants. That’s what the votes say. Maybe you voted with serious misgivings. Fuck your misgivings. They’ve got your votes. And your votes – in the only opinion poll that matters – say that Tony’s the man. They say that everything he did was right. They justify him on Iraq. They are a joyous yes to the Private Finance Initiative. They’re a pass on electoral fraud. They say that you want nothing more than to flourish your papers on demand.

Ah, yes: ID cards. You don’t like the idea at all, but that’s just one of those trivial liberal preoccupations with so-called civil liberties. How can you put that against the minimum wage? A little history is appropriate.

Labour’s origins aren’t in programmatic socialism. The party grew out of the unions – in other words it grew out of a tradition of free assembly and collective bargaining. In other words, it grew out of a tradition of political liberty to which the current government is hostile and seeks to curtail by whatever means possible.

When the government says that political liberties don’t matter to working class people, it’s using the old Cuba apologist trick. Hey man, the poor don’t need freedom of expression. They just want something to eat. Well, a lot of New Labour types are former trots and tankies so that isn’t such a surprise. Remember your Orwell on people who pass through the Communist Party “emerging with nothing but contempt for democracy and democratic methods.” Civil liberties were important to Old Labour because its members believed that working class people should succeed into the full range of their economic and political rights. Civil liberties are unimportant to New Labour because it believes that people are cattle, and that cattle need hay and a barn.

A vote for New Labour because of the minimum wage is a vote for hay and a barn for human cattle.

Well, yes, but surely they realize that these things are important to us and so we can influence them in the right direction? Sorry, that won’t do. Their response to your concerns wasn’t to offer you a deal. They’ve offered you nothing but the conviction that you can be bullied and hectored into voting right. If they succeed in doing this, they will have nothing but contempt for you. And they will be right. Because you witter on about civil liberties but you can’t even bring yourself to believe that you own your own vote.

Nick Cohen has recently gone mad, poor fellow, but remember this?

Power is New Labour’s first concern: how to hold to hold on to power, how to expand power and how to crush rival centres of power… In his attitude to the judiciary, as much as in his attitude to the BBC and his backbenchers, Blair shows an impatience with fetters on power. Listen carefully enough and you can almost hear the PM cry: ‘Do you know who I am?’

It’s up to you, shiraz quaffer. Vote for this and you might feel OK on May 6, but I think you’re going to feel pretty queasy in the long years to follow. You won’t have much cause to feel good about politics anyway. But if you vote against this, you’ll have no reason to be ashamed. You will be able to say: I didn’t vote for this. That, at least, is something.