Rolling back the last ten years
Dec 17, 2007
Bishop Hill in Civil liberties, Conservatives, Labour

With all the polls predicting a Conservative government at the next election, it's reasonable to question what changes a Cameron government might make when they finally take control. To what extent might they be ready to roll back the last ten years of the expansion of the state, the erosion of civil liberties and corruption of civil society?

Do you think that Cameron will return habeus corpus to three days? Do you think he will privatise the schools or the hospitals, or restore the right to protest in the vicinity of parliament?

Me neither.

Assuming then that he continues with the policies of the Labour party; that the schools continue to decline, that the hospitals are hotbeds of infectious disease (if you can even manage to get an appointment). Suppose that detention without charge gets extended to forty or fifty days and that a whole plethora of new reasons to demand entry to your home are written into law.

What then?

Will people abandon political parties completely, and abandon the polling booth completely. Or will they switch to peripheral and/or extremist parties?

It seems to me that it doesn't actually matter, so long as they do one or the other. Any long-term solution to the political impasse into which the Lab/Con duopoly have driven us has to involve the death of both heads of the political monster which threatens us. Now some people might find this rather alarming - as any vote for an unfamiliar party can unnerve some - but when you think about it, it's not as alarming as being locked up for three months without charge because someone in government doesn't like the colour of your shirt, which seems to be the way things are heading at the moment.

The more I think about it, the more I wonder if I am lost to mainstream politics. They are all crooks, and they are all corrupt, and until they are all strung up from Westminster lampposts, or at least consigned to the political dustbin, we are all in danger.

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