Eyre Lines

In a little over four weeks, we are going to have a general election. This should not be happening. And I’m angry. No, more than that, I’m enraged.

So, this is going to be a bit of a rant.

First of all, the excuse given for calling the election by Mrs. May was that the country had “come together behind” Brexit, but MPs by and large hadn’t. That was a bare-faced lie – after all, despite the fact that around two thirds of the spineless excuses for human beings in parliament opposed Brexit in the first place, they have rolled over and enabled the Fuhrer to start the process and invoke article 50. On the other hand, polls have consistently indicated that if the Brexit vote were rerun, it would now lose – is that “coming together behind Brexit”? I think not.

It is possible that Mrs. May has paid attention to polls such as that quoted today in the Economist, possibly with the same message their writer gives: “Pollsters find little sign that they have changed their mind, nor much demand for a second referendum. A survey by BritainThinks, a Labour-leaning think-tank, finds 67% of Britons actively favour or reluctantly accept Brexit.” Hold on there – that is not “67% support Brexit”, that is “67% either support Brexit or have come to the (correct) conclusion that they have been right royally shafted and there is probably nothing they can do about it”. The other 33%, clearly, don’t accept it at all, and are presumably dusting off the Armalites under their beds prior to going postal and shooting anyone who wears blue, or purple, or quite possibly red or orange as well (see later) or talks to them in a condescending way about “taking back sovereignty”. Heck, I count as one of that 67%, and if I could see any way of stopping Brexit short of the illegal, I’d do it. Note that “short of the illegal” – no, I don’t have an Armalite.

It should also not be happening because one of the few major measures which the Liberal Democrats managed to force on the Conservatives during the coalition was the Fixed Term Parliaments Act. There should have been no election until 2020 unless either they pass a motion of “no confidence” or a 67% supermajority of the House of Commons votes for an early election. The whole point of this was to remove the power of the Prime Minister to call a snap election at a time beneficial to the ruling party. Mrs. May has a slender majority, but would be very unlikely to have a vote of “no confidence” passed against her (despite the fact that I suspect around 67% of MPs actually have no confidence in her… there’s that 67% figure again!). What do the brainless idiots in (in particular) the Labour Party go and do? They vote for a snap election anyhow, at a time when all the polls indicate that Mrs. May will do very well in an election and get a stonking majority at their expense. Exactly what the Act was designed to STOP happening.

Actually, I would suggest that given the wafer-thin majority in favour of Brexit, the best representation we could have in parliament is a wafer-thin majority in favour of the Tories. But far be it from the other party leaders to point that out and resolutely vote against an election!

I might almost suspect that the die-hard Blairites who populate most of the Labour seats hate Corbyn so much that they want to force an election in which he will do badly even if they lose their seats in the process and even if it is the worst possible thing for the country to have a large Tory majority at the moment (and it pretty much is…) I grant you, Corbyn supported the move, but did he fall or was he pushed?

So, we are to vote for May because she is a “strong leader” and is best to represent us in the Brexit negotiations, should we? Well, given that a majority of us don’t actually want Brexit, can I suggest that what we actually want is a weak, incompetent leader who will make such a mess of the negotiations that parliament will come to it’s collective senses and decide “no, that wasn’t a good idea after all”? Someone who makes Jim Hacker look like Winston Churchill?

The alternative is, of course, Corbyn, or (in an ideal world) a coalition involving Corbyn, Nicola Sturgeon and (preferably) Tim Farrand. You want a strong leader to represent us? OK, maybe that isn’t Corbyn, but how about Nicola Sturgeon, who could (I think) give any European leader cause to tremble. Corbyn himself? Well, I look at the chorus of hate which has been being directed at him (not least from his own party) and cannot help thinking of the chorus of hate directed at Hilary Clinton, which (see the Guardian article I linked above) is probably in both cases largely down to Cambridge Analytics and their world-beating brand of disinformation peddling. I actually think Corbyn is more like Bernie Sanders than anything else, in that he’s honest, and he’s a social democrat, and he cares more about the good of the people than he does about his own career and self-importance (in which he’s a complete contrast to Mrs. May, who was against Brexit until she spotted the opportunity to be given a mandate to handbag Europe).

However, as the Economist article actually gets right, mostly the election is going to be about how much power the Conservatives should be given. They were fairly nasty when in coalition with the Liberal Democrats (for which, unfortunately, the Liberal Democrats have not yet been forgiven, despite it being clear that they moderated the awfulness of the Tories quite well) and have proved significantly more nasty without the restriction of coalition, but with a rather thin majority. I shudder to think what things will be like if they manage a majority of over 100, because that generally signals that the government can also largely ignore its back benchers.

The one good thing about there being an election is that it gives us an opportunity to correct both our recent mistakes – the Tory majority, and the Brexit vote.

But it pains and angers me to concede that this is probably a vain hope. Unless the polls are horribly wrong (and I pray that they are) we will see a massive Conservative majority after June. A couple of years hence, we will experience a hard Brexit (Europe can’t afford a soft one), and our complaints about some prices going up a bit because of the weakness of the pound will look trivial, as we see an even weaker pound, tariffs flying around in every direction and, probably, a 10-15% reduction in our economy. By then, the NHS and the Welfare State will be jokes, and our reduced wages will not go far against American-style health bills.

The trouble is, all the main parties (apart from the Scottish Nationalists) have now agreed to go along with a Brexit of some kind, even the Liberal Democrats, though their pledge to put the issue to another referendum can rightly be regarded as code for “You’re not going to like the terms, and will reject them”. However, given the other policy issues facing us, what we need to do is swallow any concerns about leadership (see above) and vote for policies.

And the overriding policy should be ABC – “Anything but Conservative”. It’s easy if you’re in Scotland – just vote SNP (you were going to do that anyhow!). Otherwise, vote for whichever of Labour, Liberal Democrat, Green or Plaid Cymru stands the best chance of beating the Conservative candidate.

And hope that the polls are wrong…