Even after all the crap of the last few years the current Labour government is still better than the last lot.
The nastiest things about it would all be the same or worse with the Tories. Its easy to list them: the war, i.d. cards, PFI, sucking up to the monarchy, militarism, toadying to the Daily Mail, posturing on crime, racist asylum rules, failure to complete the reform of the Lords.
The least bad bits would all have been opposed by the Tories: Scottish Parliament, some increase in resources for NHS and public transport, some minor improvements in welfare payments, at least bothering to start Lords reform, permitting the Congestion Charge, some small but genuine increases in foreign aid to the poorest countries in Africa, real support for eastern European EU membership.
We have to vote for them, there is no-one else to vote for with any chance of getting in. If they don't, the Tories will.
And I'm genuinely scared of another Tory government.
I remember last time. I remember hundreds of thousands getting thrown out of work in a few weeks, almost from the moment Thatcher got in and pulled the plug out of the economy and let the jobs go down the drain. Millions leaving school or college with no hope of getting work.
I was on the dole for not much more than two years. I had a comparatively easy time of it, mostly staying with my parents in a comfortable house. But even in the supposedly prosperous South of England I got one reply from somewhere between eighty and a hundred job applications. I don't mean just one interview or one offer, I really do mean one reply, one acknowledgement, one prospective employer even bothering to say "no". There were no jobs for new starters, however well educated you were or whatever part of the country you lived in.
That got fixed later. In the mid-1980s us university-educated and reasonably presentable unemployed folk got to rejoin the middle classes - leaving behind us millions who were in the wrong place or the wrong time or had the wrong education or were just too old (and that meant younger than I am now). After about 1984 there were jobs around, for those lucky enough to be under 40 and be in the right part of Britain. Though we'll never make up all of what was lost. My generation will never be as prosperous as those a few years older than us who got jobs and houses in the late 60s or early 70s and got on the ladder before the so-called monetarists started smashing the infrastructure for firewood to give them heat to sell the family silver by.
But it was a lot worse for other people and in other places. And nowadays people like to forget how bad it was. The popular myth is that "everything was going to the dogs" in the 70s and somehow Thatcher fixed it. She was "harsh but necessary". "Someone had to do it". But the worst times were in 1981 and 1982 when Britain came as near to a violent collapse of society and government as at any time for at least 130 years. There were strikes and riots and a huge increase in crime. The government were so desperate to get us our dole cheques that at one time I didn't have to sign on and the giros were being sent by post from the DVLC in Swansea because the DHSS (or whatever it was called in those days) was strikebound and incapable. Thatcher was saved by the Falklands war, and lasted until her own party saw what a liability she was.
There was nothing inevitable about 18 years of Tory rule. People talk bollocks about how we had to have Thatcher, because of the economy or the unions or whatever. Crap. France never had Thatcher and they ended up no worse than we were after the 80s. Better in some ways. And now we know that it all wasn't true. It was all for nothing.. They used to tell us that you couldn't have all of low inflation, falling unemployment, rising wages, low interest rates, and economic growth together. That you would be lucky to get away with 2 or 3 of them, and then only if you allowed the employers to smash the unions. And yet we have now had all of those for years. Its not perfect. Its not paradise. Its not even remotely like socialism. But its a hell of a lot better than it was, and a hell of a lot better than Thatcher wanted us to have. All that monetarism crap they used to force down our throats, all that guff about "vicious spirals" and how greedy workers were destroying the economy by demanding wages, it was all quite simply false. We needn't have done it. A slightly different government would probably have got us to more or less where we are now without the deliberately encouraged unemployment, without the housing boom-slump-boom-slump-boom (& soon to be slump again), without the destruction of hundreds of communities, without all that Thatcherite social engineering, without all that blithering, sickening, crowing, triumphal, authoritarian, Tory braying we put up with for over a decade, without having to spend years of our lives on the dole queue.
I've got a teenage daughter. And from pure selfishness I don't want to see another Tory government until she has had a decent education, a job and a house if she wants one. I want her to be set up in life before the buggers come back and do us all over again.
So I don't want the Labour Party to throw this next election away. Or the one after next. And they are doing just that. Fawning all over the Americans. Drawing back from Kyoto. Slagging the jury system. Appointed toadies in Parliament through the House of Lords. House arrest without trial. Bloody i.d. bloody cards.
But we have to vote for them because otherwise its the bloody Tories and they know that.
Shit.