God Help Me

[Obnoxio The Clown]

I have decided, I believe, who I am going to vote for in the coming elections. And it truly is something I'm going to do with gritted teeth and no small amount of personal anguish.

I'm going to vote for the Labour Party.

Not only am I going to vote for the Labour Party, but I urge you to vote for the Labour Party too.*

Now, you may well believe that I've either lost my senses or I've been kidnapped by Peter Mandelson who is currently writing this for me.

But neither of these is true.

I have come to the conclusion that there is little point in voting for a fringe party, because British people are still far too tribal to elect loads of little parties into parliament (although that would be great, too!)

The reality of this is that either the Tories or Labour are going to wind up running the show and contrary to what you might expect, I'd like it to be Labour that wins. Well, not really, what I'd like is for them to be burned at the stake, their ashes pulverized and then scattered to the four winds. But think about this: no matter who wins the election, we're going to be crucified for the next decade at least. The state is going to have to be decimated, spending programs will have to be slashed and the economy is going to be crushed under taxes and shit growth.

When the Major government won the '92 election, Major said that the only thing that would keep Britain afloat was the ERM. When we were unceremoniously ejected, his credibility and that of the Tory Party was bludgeoned into nothingness, something that took more than a decade for the Tories to even think about getting back.

Imagine what havoc would be wreaked upon Labour's credibility if they had to be the party of cuts, the party that actually inherited the consequences of their economic mismanagement? It would take a generation for them to recover. The faction fighting and internecine struggles would prevent them from doing any actual governing as well.

But even better, imagine what the consequences would be for the Tories if they were rejected at the polls again. The buttered new potato would certainly get the hoof, and the centrist, vapid, statist, social democratic wing of the Tory party would be rightly silenced. Iain Duncan Smith and his fucking one nation social justice would finally be consigned to the dustbin of history and who knows, the Tories might actually implode altogether.

And from the ruins of this morass of big government, quango-loving goat-felchers may well arise a different political system, one which recognises that British people have to potential to be something other than vacuous sheep. A political system that has learned the lesson that you cannot have everybody living at the expense of someone else. A political system that has learned that government is the problem, not the solution.

So once again, I ask you to vote Labour, but failing that: anyone but Dave.

*Unless there's an LPUK candidate in your area. Obviously.