Sunday 10 May 2015

The General Election - my verdict

I haven’t written in a while. Term time will do that. The fine balance of working and studying.

Term is nearly over for the summer and the General Election has taken place and the results were horrifying. The Conservatives won a Majority. No poll had predicted, even the Tories did not predict it. As I sat watching the exit polls coming in my heart sank through the floor. My hope faded, only temporarily as it will be found and returned to its owner soon, and my anger began. As if the country had not enough the electorate wanted five more years of pain and suffering. BDSM party goers, the lot of them.

There are people blaming the SNP. I don’t blame the SNP. I have a soft spot for Nicola Sturgeon. I don’t want independence. I am an idealist who feels that unification is best as opposed to splitting into different parts. Ultimately though who are we to tell the Scottish, the Welsh or the Northern Irish how they should vote or feel about Westminster? My only issue with Scottish independence is the idea that if Scotland are fine then that is the main thing. The North of England are just as hard hit by the cuts and feel what Scotland feel. We should come together not split apart. This is after all only my humble opinion as I have never lived anywhere outside of England.

Ed Miliband was not to fault either. He was a strong man, maybe not a natural leader but certainly had courage of his convictions and the right ideas. Unfortunately he was trying to bring the Labour party to back whence it came in an ideological sense which didn’t seem to go down well. There are now calls for the Labour party to submit further to the centre than where it lies now.

So what led to the Tories coming to power and defying all odds?

Despite Ed Miliband not being at fault, the Labour party did not seek to dispel the idea that they were not to blame for the financial crash. This has been accepted by many as a financial crisis and yet the Labour party still get wacked round the head every time it comes up in conversation. Before the recession, caused by the fall of Lehman Brothers in America which sent shock waves through the globalised economy, our deficit and spending were about as high as you’d expect. When recession hit this caused businesses to liquidate therefore making people redundant and therefore causing people to lose their homes. This caused overspending, not the government itself. I am not a fan of New Labour but this is something they needed to fight back on.

Scottish Independence, whether you agreed or not, Labour and the Conservatives provided a united front who did nothing to help in Labour’s image in Scotland. The people of Scotland wanted change one way or another and Labour did nothing to present they could pursue this change in their ‘No’ campaign. 

The argument always came back to Ed Miliband and his image. The right wing press love the fact he couldn’t eat a bacon sandwich and tended to trip over a lot. Since when has this ever been important in politics? It is ridiculous that this is how we judge our politicians in the mainstream media. Ed Miliband genuinely wanted to do something different but the sandwich let him down or rather the media did. There were attempts to humanise this accident which lets face it has happened to the best of us, but unfortunately image was a problem. It shouldn’t be but it was made an issue.

In addition to this the Tories spoke the right language. People are scared and the landscape at the moment is fear. Recessions have been an occurrence every decade or so but this past one was the worst and it made people uncertain about their future. They guaranteed more of the same and it comes back to this idea of if me and mine are fine then screw everyone else. This is the issue we face now, we see this is in our dealing homelessness, the environment and climate change, immigration and welfare. As a child we are told to leave something as we found it. By this virtue we will not leave the Earth as we found it. If we are not careful we will see the end of the NHS, schools run by the local councils for local children, Human Rights Bill and an environment where we’ve plundered all of its resources with our children cleaning up the mess.