Surely We Are At the Bottom Now

Reaching the bottom of the barrel with New Labour is hard to judge. We have had the looting of financial institutions and of the state, and the effective bankruptcy of major banks. We have had economic deterioration over the last 12 years to the point where nearly six million working-age people are economically inactive and over half of that number are likely to remain so for the rest of their lives. Allied with this last is the building of a New Labour client state of holders of state and quasi state 'jobs' and the development of a Third Sector fronted by various former charities that are now New Labour agencies. The uploading of highly personal and private information about diverse sections of the population continues, and such data is often 'lost' into uncontrolled circumstances. We have an imposed Party leader acting as the country's prime minister whose personal character and moral defects are notorious. We have a regime whose members from the prime minister downwards, are profiteering from office while excusing themselves that such iniquitous taking is 'within the rules'.

Yet poll after poll confirms that around 30% of the electorate would vote for Labour as if another party entirely were on offer. It isn't. Those who wish to press for social equalities, and for universal access to education and health care, together with environmentally responsible provision of energy, housing and management of transport infrastructures, as well as husbanding of our natural resources, will not find any means of doing so through Labour. It was the great Liberal and Conservative statesmen of the past who formulated and brought in the health and educational reforms that Labour claims for its own myth in any case. The bully boys, the political thugs, the liars, the exploiters of office who are running, and ruining the country, are the Labour party.

And there is something to be done. The European Union elections must be held, there can be no finagling over them by the Labour regime, as there can be for UK elections. Usually voter turnout is very low, and it will be in Labour's interest if it remains so this time. Losses can be brushed aside - voter apathy identified as satisfaction with Labour rule rather than Labour losses making the monumental unrepresentativeness of Labour starkly apparent. Whenever the opportunity to vote against Labour cannot be with held or subverted it must be grasped enthusiastically for that alone - as a public expression of rejection of Brown and his corruption and incompetence and bullying viciousness.

War, torture, detention without trial, false imprisonment and beatings of demonstrators, killings, social and cultural manipulation and control, unemployment, homelessness, illiteracy, unnecessary suffering and death in the hospitals, the privatisation of profit and socialisation of loss using a crippling and demotivating tax burden, the wrecking of pensions and security in old age. Voting against Labour will end its patronage of all these things and give the opportunity to build a democratic political movement and party of those committed to honesty and fairness in our public life, and respect for privacy and individual liberties in our society.