Monday 29 August 2011

Don't vote labour

Every time you are tempted to think of Gordon Brown as a left wing
politician, recall his £160-240bn legacy of disastrous and
extremely inefficientPFI neoliberal economic alchemy schemes.
Every time I hear a Labour party supporter pushing the party line and repeating their mealy-mouthed and weakest possible criticisms of the coalition government (for fear of upsetting the neoliberal economic orthodoxy their party adheres to), I just wish they'd give their outdated partisan rambling a break.

Apart from the introduction of a few badly designed and inefficient bits of pseudo-socialist window dressing, to appease their core voters and the trade unions, New Labour were as neoliberal as Margaret Thatcher.

Neoliberalism has become the unquestionable economic orthodoxy, enforced by the unelected economic overlords at the IMF, the World Bank and most of the world's central banks. Labour followed neoliberal economic orthodoxy diligently, handing massive chunks of state infrastructure to tax dodging scam artists, hugely increasing the gap between the rich and the poor, commodifying education, eroding the principle of equal justice and recklessly liberalising the regulation that was meant to keep a check on the venal and nefarious uber-rich, that so often use their massive wealth to further their selfish and amoral pursuit of even more wealth, no matter what the cost to society.

After all of that they crowned it with the one of the biggest transferences of wealth in history from the ordinary to the super rich economic elite in the form of £900bn bailout to cover the bad debts of the reckless bankers to be paid off by decades of "austerity" imposed on ordinary working people, justified with the great neoliberal lie, that there is no alternative.


If you are one of those people that chooses to hang onto your illusory 20th Century tribal party distinctions and can't understand that all three of the main parties are now hard line neoliberals clamouring to repeat the lie that "the state is too big" and that state spending on infrastructure, education, healthcare and welfare needs to be slashed, when the legitimate debts of the state are completely dwarfed by the the money borrowed by the Neo-Labour party (with the explicit backing of the Tories) in order to give near unconditional handouts to their uber-rich corporatist pals, then you don't really have much to offer to the debate.

The Labour party left behind their credentials as nation builders, ethical social reformers and the representatives of ordinary working people a generation ago. Nowadays when you vote Labour, you are not voting for socialism, not for the left, not for social reform nor for workers' solidarity, you are simply voting on your preference for the colour red.

It amazes me that the gelded trade unions that provided such a large proportion of Labour party donations let Neo-Labour get away with their cosy and relaxed attitude towards the super rich and the tax evaders. After all, the core purpose of the trade unions was meant to be the protection of the interests of ordinary working taxpayers against the interests of the super rich, the landed rentier class and the corporate elites that tend to exploit them.

It also amazes me that millions of Labour voters apathetically let control of their party be seized by the right wing establishment elite out of a primitive fear that "it would be much worse under the Tories".


The biggest condemnation of Labour is that had they used their 1997 landslide as a mandate to spent just one term of government actively undoing some of the most egregious neoliberal abuses of the state imposed by the first Thatcherite party, the raving neoliberal Tories would still be much further away from achieving their goal of turning the UK into a Friedman's wet dream of a selfish, amoral, greed-is-good, fuck the needy, survival of the fittest society.

Let me get this clear. If you vote Tory, Lib-Dem or Labour you are a de facto supporter of the bankrupt neoliberal economic orthodoxy.

Vote for alternative parties or don't vote at all. Choosing the lesser of three evils is just giving a false mandate to the amoral neoliberals that want to destroy our sense of national solidarity and reinvent our nation as one of purely self interested consumers/debt slaves in which ownership of all state infrastructure has been seized by the tiny economic elite.

In terms of democratic mandate the bar is already set pretty low in the UK. 21.5% of the eligible vote was enough for Tony Blair to retain power for Neo-Labour in 2005 and 23% of the eligible vote was enough to make slimy PR man "Call Me" Dave our prime minister now, so please don't encourage any of the neoliberal parties by giving them your vote.