“Vote for us, we’ll make things worse!”

By David Beeson

There is a fresh new breeze blowing through politics today. David Cameron and the Tories are going to renew politics in this country and for that we should be deeply grateful to them.

Cameron has shown himself to be keen to learn from the errors of the past and avoid making them himself. He saw, for instance, the euphoria that greeted Tony Blair’s election back in 1997. It actually lasted for several years, amazingly, but then, with the Iraq war, it all began to unravel and give way to a disappointment all the deeper because the previous hopes had been so high.

Then last year Obama was elected in the States, and again our optimism knew no bounds. Just one year on, we’re beginning to wonder whether our expectations were too high, and disappointment again is beginning to creep in.

Cameron has realised that to have one’s hopes betrayed in this way is agonisingly painful. So he’s decided to spare us that pain. He’s getting his disappointment in ahead of time.

So he’s adopting economic policies which, if ever he gets to apply them, will slash public services and make life in this country much more difficult for us all. I mean, forget the health service or education, just think of something as simple as the railways: today you can catch a train with a high expectation that it will run and will get you to your destination on time. Remember how it was under Thatcher and Major?

But the worst thing is that those policies won’t just cut services, they’ll massively increase unemployment and deepen the recession while prolonging it. But the Tories aren’t hiding any of that: elect them, they’re saying, and we’ll make things much worse.

Meanwhile, at a time when one of our problems in this country is the rise of the ultra-right, Cameron has come up with a brilliant way of countering that threat. He’s got into bed with some of the nastiest racist and crypto-fascist parties on the continent. To do that, he’s made sure he’s no longer in a group with Merkel or Sarkozy or anyone who might actually wield influence in Europe or around the world. He’s also decided to demand a re-negotiation of Britain’s arrangements with the EU, a position that is getting up the nose or more less everyone else in Europe and would lead to Britain being marginalised and isolated.

So at a time when the major world powers, such as the US, China or Russia, are making it clear that they will be dealing principally with each other and have little time for minor players, Cameron has decided to make sure that Britain has no influence within the one major bloc to which it belongs. He wants the opportunity to make the country irrelevant on the world stage.

It’s wonderful, isn’t it? He’s being absolutely straight with us, making sure we can’t be disappointed if ever he’s elected. Vote for us, he’s saying, and you’ll get a lot of pain, some nasty politics and widespread incompetence.

Don’t say you weren’t warned.