Tomorrow is the general election in the UK where the Labour party and its leader Jeremy Corbyn have been subject to a massive smear campaign. Not being British, my views count for little but here is a cartoon by another non-Britisher, an Australian cartoonist who goes under the pen-name ‘first dog on the moon’, that quite nicely sums up my feelings.
As the cartoonist rightly points out, “You know you’re not legally required to like Jeremy Corbyn in order to vote for him right?”
And yet the same cartoonist constantly ran down the Australian Labor leader, who lost narrowly to our own version of Toilet Head, Bum Face, one Scrotum by name.
It’s not as simple as “vote labour”. We need to vote for whoever will keep the Conservative party out, whether that’s Labour, the LibDemss, or the Green. And even then most people, myself included, live in such safe seats that our votes are essentially meaningless.
I don’t live in a safe seat, it was Lib Dem, is Tory and I probably ought to vote Lib Dem to get the Tory out. I can’t and shall vote Labour. The Lib Dems will say anything to get elected, and then blithely ignore anythiing that isn’t convenient, I’ve seen it locally in Wolverhampton and Sheffield, and of course nationally when they were in the coalition, I simply can’t being myself to vote for them.
Jazzlet: I hear you. I *agree*. But tomorrow is not the time. Tomorrow is the time to hold your nose and make sure its NOT Alexander Johnson in charge come Friday. Please.
sonofrojblake@4, Exactly. Jazzlet@3, The crritical thing is to deny the nasty party. Do what the French did some years ago when Le Pen made the second-round and put a clothespin on your nose and vote for whoever has the best chance of winning… and is not part of the nasty party. Please!
As the recipient of a postal vote, I already voted for Labour a week ago!
Mind you, it was a somewhat difficult decision. Not on conscience grounds though -- Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour party is probably the closest thing we’ve had to a mainstream party that represents my fairly far-left views in my lifetime. I was born in the mid 80s, and was first able to vote after the Blairite neo-liberals had seized the Labour Party. This is actually the first time I’ve had a mainstream left-wing alternative to vote for.
Usually I just vote tactically, for whoever is most likely to keep the Tories out. Mostly that has meant the Lib Dems, who have been the only other major political force in both my home constituency in Somerset and in Oxford where I was at university for quite a while. When I lived in Brighton for a year I did get the chance to vote for the Green Party, which proved successful. But they’re not a realistic concern anywhere else yet, and don’t look likely to be in the near future.
But this time round the appropriate tactical vote was not so easy to calibrate. In the last election the Tories had about 45% of the vote in my home constituency, where the Lib Dems and Labour both had around 25%. But the trends over the last decade have been downward for the Lib Dems (who won in 2010), going from 45% down to 30% and now 25%, whereas Labour has risen from only 5% in 2010 up to 15% and now 25%. So if the trend continues in this way, Labour are the ones to back. Not that one can predict this will be the case, of course. But since there is no real way to determine how everyone else is planning to vote (the Brexit issue is the big Lib Dem thing, but we were pretty much 50-50 remain-leave in central Somerset, no clues there), and the party reflects my views better, I voted Labour. Even if they don’t win my constituency, it’s still another vote to add to the grand totals that will record the popularity of the various parties’ positions, and hopefully help shift the Overton Window in an agreeably socialistic direction.
The cartoonist (Andrew Marlton) wrote a powerful poem about refugees, and Australia’s response to them.
Ouch.
It was worse than we’d imagined.
In the end, the only thing that mattered was Brexit. Brexit now, Brexit guaranteed, the worst possible Brexit.
It’s a sad world where good men are unelectable. It means a shift to the right for labour in order to make themselves appealing to those who only voted tories because they were afraid of the Big Bad Corbyn.
Christ, now I really know how Americans felt in 2016.
“It’s a sad world where good men are unelectable”
If Corbyn were a good man he’d have resigned the last time he lost an election.