OPINION
Keir Starmer should be sent a clear message in the local elections (Image: PA)
So, how are you going to vote tomorrow? I’ll be sitting on my hands watching as there’s nowt going on where I live, but if some punters are correct, we are about to see the biggest political shift in a generation. Sir Keir Starmer’s ghastly freebie-taking, union-placating, pensioner-persecuting, tax-raising class warriors well and truly deserve a smack in the chops, but it’s obvious that the Tories are in no state to do it. But will Reform make the big breakthrough?
I remember the ’97 election and its aftermath: plenty of people forecast the end of the Conservatives back then. I never believed it: I always thought they’d be back. But circumstances were different then. There were three factors that led to the collapse of the blue vote: to start, John Major was a terrible PM. Then there was the terrible infighting wracking the party over what they’d done to Mrs Thatcher – the bitterness took the best part of two decades to calm down.
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And then, of course, they faced an utterly formidable operator: Tony Blair. Personally I believe he is responsible for practically every evil bedevilling this country, from opening the immigration doors to unleashing savagery in the Middle East, but there is no denying that “Tone” was incredibly good at convincing the country he’d be a breath of fresh air. The fact that it ended up stinking of the sewer is neither here nor there.
Starmer’s no Blair; he’s in No.10 by default, not because most wished him to be there. The UK just, understandably, wanted to be shot of a party that treated high office like a toy passed around a playground. After despatching yet another blond vote-winning PM, the premiership was shunted about like Buggin’s turn.
First we had one who trashed the economy (I’m reading Anthony Seldon’s masterly account of Liz Truss’s mercifully brief time in power and boy, was she warned), then another who had wielded the assassin’s knife: just what did they expect?
And all the while both parties have been giving an extremely good impression of being driven entirely by their own agendas, with not a thought for what the country actually wants or needs.
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Then along comes Nigel Farage, presenting himself as an affable man of the people. Would you rather have a pint with Keir, Kemi or Nige? There was no Nigel equivalent in 1997, just a country sick of Tory infighting presented with a massively successful snake oil salesman in the shape of Tony Blair.
Farage says that we are about to see a seismic change that will see the Tories suffer the same fate as the Liberals, pushed out of the centre of mainstream politics, a position from which they’ve never recovered. I hope he is wrong.
Tomorrow, if both parties wake up reeling from the shock of the birth of a new political order, they have only themselves to blame.
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