I no longer agree with Nick. There – I’ve said it. Nick was wrong.
I know however many well intentioned people voted Lib Dem because they thought they would offer the change, and stood for progressive politics. In Hornsey & Wood Green where I live people voted for a Lib Dem MP believing it would keep Cameron out. I know it Witney many did so too – but sadly that vote, those millions of vote have now helped Cameron get his hands on the keys to no.10.
If you were one of them, if you stand for progressive values, for social justice and you regret your vote helping Cameron get into power – it would be great to hear from you – and let me know how you feel.
Please email me at stopcameron@googlemail.com and I will post your statements here.
The fight goes on.
I would begin by asking the obvious question raised by your piece, ‘who, around here, cares about Hornsey and Wood Green?’
This is the countryside constituency of the district of Witney. If you seriously believe that the inner-city requirements of a London Borough apply to the Oxfordshire countryside, you are even more disconnected from the voters, who you claim you are attempting to represent, than is immediately apparent.
Also, the evidence is that you are wholly mistaken when you voice your opinion that ‘many people in Witney voted Lib Dem because they thought it would offer change’.
And here’s why:
Witney is classified on various political websites as ‘an ultra-safe Conservative seat’.
Given this fact, the impressive total of the Lib Dem vote clearly indicates that a substantial number of the locals did not want to vote for Cameron and could not bring themselves to vote for New Labour.
Voting Lib Dem wasn’t, as you mistakenly think, a vote for change. It was a protest vote. And on the point of protesting about the New Labour government, who could blame us?
Under New Labour we have lost handfuls of long-established civil liberties.
Under New Labour we have seen the Home Secretary make repeated attempts to interfere with the independence of the judicial process.
Under New Labour I, like thousands of others, have been stopped by the police and illegally asked for my personal details, simply because I was taking photographs of public scenes in central London.
Under New Labour we have seen the right to protest within the sight of the House of Commons repealed.
And let us not forget that last year, New Labour used its own heavy-handed and disproportionate anti-terror legislation to eject – from its own party political platform – a pensioner, a card-carrying Labour Party member, who had the temerity to describe Jack Straw’s speech as ‘bollocks’.
Under New Labour we have become the most heavily surveilled public on the face of this planet.
Under New Labour we have seen Jack Straw, Tony Blair – and other New Labour cronies – lie openly to their peers about ‘extraordinary rendition’ and about knowledge of obtaining information by torture, and lie about the reasons for the Iraq War, and lie and lie and lie and lie.
I, unlike the bulk of New Labour’s self-serving trough-grubbers, am a socialist, an old-style socialist, a Bennite. But even I could not bring myself to vote for the political corruption that is New Labour, if my life depended on it.
The very idea that you consider that New Labour stands for (to use your own words) ‘progressive values and social justice’ is risible, and your judgemental error in this merely proves the overwhelming breadth and depth of your disconnect with reality once again.
‘Progressive values and social justice’? Really?
At the risk of putting you on an impossible-to-substantiate spot, please explain where the ‘progressive values and social justice’ are in Jack Straw and David Miliband’s continued perpetuation of this horror?
(DELETED FOR OFFENSIVE MATERIAL & PROFANITY)
This continuing scandal in Diego Garcia is just yet another New Labour shocker that is being perpetuated on British dependents in particular, and being inflicted on the world in general, by corrupt New Labour politicians.
Your party – the party of New Labour – has no value; it is corrupt, it is immoral and the New Labour political leaders, past and present, are overdue a full and frank hearing in front of The Hague’s War Crimes unit.
Give me a real party of socialists. New Labour lacks substance, style and, more importantly, any discernible mote of political value.
The sooner the self-serving liars and cheats of New Labour are gone from public sight, the better off we shall all be.
That’s why your showing in Witney was so woeful; the public are not as gullible as you, and New Labour, think we are.
Oh dear – sounds like someone is somewhat disgruntled.
Some concerns worth of debate here but the response seems a tad parochial. The point about Hornsey is as valid as it is for any constituency where people have voted Lib Dem and perhaps feel cheated – by them surrendering any ounce of integrity they had for the sake of a ministerial mondeo.
I appreciate there are those that were unhappy with some of the issues you mention but compared to Nick Clegg’s plans in the Orange Book to privatise the NHS, to cut winter fuel payments, and tax credits, and give a tax break to the richest in our society and now by all accounts a VAT hike – I know that’s what I call regressive.
But lets see what drops out of the emergency budget.
Do you truly feel that highlighting New Labour’s illegalities and moral and ethical failures makes a person merely ‘disgruntled’? How high-handed, supercilious and condescending of you.
You are truly made out of the New Labour mould.