Election Fever #2

Horrible news! No sooner had the General Election been officially announced than Tory leader David "call me Dave" Cameron made a visit to my home town, where he lectured some bemused bakery workers on the evils of raising National Insurance and made some bad bread-related jokes.

All this has drawn my attention to the fact that my constituency is apparently a "key marginal seat." Meaning that the Tories believe they have a real chance of snatching it back from Labour for the first time since 1997. This has shocked me to the core. In spite of the fact that I have a Politics degree and have lived in this town for most of my life, I was completely unaware that my current constituency used to be a Tory stronghold. You would have thought a shitty run-down former mill town like this would be natural Labour territory.

This revelation has caused me to lean heavily in the direction of tactical voting, i.e. voting Labour in recognition of the fact that the Liberal Democrats and the Greens can't possibly win the seat and therefore voting Labour is the best way to stop the Tories getting their hands on it. This will mean overcoming all sorts of objections I've had to the New Labour governments of the last 13 years, including but not limited to: the Iraq war, student tuition fees, the creeping privatisation of public services, reliance on free market economics, failure to reduce the gap between rich and poor, failure to do anything for all those made unemployed by the recession, MPs embroiled in expenses scandals, etc.

So in order to remind myself why I'm choosing to vote for the lesser of two evils, here is a list of some of their (all too limited) achievements since 1997.

1. The introduction of the National Minimum Wage. Okay so the existing rate (just £4.81 an hour for workers under the age of 21) is still too low, but this move still made a significant increase in many worker's paypackets. God knows I've worked enough shitty, low-paid jobs where you're exploited for hours on end only to go home with barely enough money to pay the bills. That is simply unacceptable in this day and age - nobody who works full time should struggle to make essential payments. The Tories opposed this policy on its introduction before eventually backing down when it proved not to be an economy-wrecking move as predicted.

2. The devolution of power in Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland. Representative democracy is best served when you have a higher number of representatives in proportion to voters. London is not representative of the whole country and yet policy is all to often determined by people who rarely set foot outside the capital. By giving the non-English nations their own policy-making powers, Labour gave greater power to the average voter in those areas. It's just a shame that plans to do the same for the North West and North East were shelved.

3. Increased public spending on health and education. Any government which doesn't prioritise these two above such ridiculous issues as tax cuts or "reducing the national debt" is a government not fit to rule. Still, it's a shame that the extra money came with so many strings attached.

4. Peace in Northern Ireland. John Major may have played a part in this, but it was Blair's government which secured the Good Friday Agreement (largely thanks to Mo Mowlam). It hasn't all been plain-sailing since then, but if you think back to how things were in Northern Ireland fifteen years ago, the decrease in sectarian violence and hostility is enormous.

5. Gay rights. The age of consent for consenting homosexuals was lowered to sixteen, civil partnerships were introduced (although why they couldn't just call it gay marriage is still beyond me), Section 28 was abolished and gay adoption was legalised. Legislation was also introduced against discrimination towards gay people. This is one area of British politics where it's heartening to see how common sense and equality have triumphed over religion and bigotry.

6. Fox hunting was banned. Finally.

7. Free museum admissions, Sure Start centres and free nursery places - all positive moves on education.

So if you just ignore the war-mongering, the profiteering, the obsession with pleasing big business, the neglect of the most vulnerable in society and a few other glaring catastrophes, then New Labour hasn't been so bad after all. It's a long way from being my ideal party, but you have to ask yourself: how many of the above developments would we have seen under a Tory government?

Given how many Tories opposed the above measures when they were introduced, I'm guessing not many.