Tuesday 9 July 2013

Miliband for a Landslide?

Following up a story about benefit cuts and people in London splitting up to maximise benefits, I note that the Daily Telegraph has a new toy that tracks polling. If people voted now for a General Election, the tracker in front of me states that Labour would have 361 seats, Tories 247, the Lib Dems crash to 17 and UKIP has zero. The UKIP effect benefits Labour. The report about the tracker, presumably earlier, has the Labour majority higher and the Liberal Democrats doing a little better.

At the weekend I dozed off near the end of the Washington Journal on BBC Parliament and woke into a briefing by Nick Clegg. I ended up mouthing off Anglo-Saxon expletive after expletive because this man stole my vote. On the making the new unemployed lose a week's money rather than three days worth, he said they didn't because they money is ploughed back into job seeking activities. Arsehole. Yes the money is taken off those who need it and the job seeking help is the same round the roundabout stuff that has been done for years. It never progresses and achieves little. This man stole my vote, because I voted for the Liberal Democrats on the basis of their manifesto and not the neo-liberal economics that is burying hope for many.

I am worried about Labour. I am less worried about Falkirk and following the news agenda there, but I am worried about Labour running scared and taking the poor's vote for granted. If you keep appealing to the middle class, keep saying we won't frighten the horses, then the vote to rely on vacates itself and hollows out.

This happened under Brown and Blair: it's Miliband being a left-winger (we hope) that makes him more attractive, not less. We have reached, now, a time of necessities, when the spirit of 1945 is more relevant and fair and achieves more than this negative neo-liberal economic road to nowhere.

The Liberal Democrats need to be punished very severely, and need to be forced into their own disaster zone and take decades to crawl out again, if ever. As Labour went to the right under Blair, they went left, took many students with them, and built quite a broad urban alliance, and then the Orange Book squad used the votes received to dump on us. If the Liberal Democrats have any sense they'll arrange for a new leader to replace this one for another Parliament.

Hard luck if apologists like Simon Hughes gets kicked out, and Danny Alexander will hopefully be kicked out as far as the boot will transfer its kinetic energy. I can't wait for revenge, if I survive until 2015.

As for the Tories, we shouldn't have been surprised. They are what they are, and have proved it, and obsessed about Europe too.

The problem for Ed Miliband is that it is his election to lose. It may be that the coalition cannot survive much longer, although the Liberal Democrats will no doubt hang on and hang on. The Prime Minister can no longer call an election, but the House of Commons can, and the sooner the better please.

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