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Wednesday 19 May 2010

Voted for change did you?

Some of the post-coalition media comment has been annoying. These bloody pundits will keep insisting that they know why we all voted as we did. We voted for change, they say. Our vote was all about the budget deficit, they say. We are determined to have a new kind of politics, they say.


They're bloody wrong, though. Most of us think there's been a damn sight too much change in the last 13 years and would vote to put the clock back if we thought it was remotely feasible. A lot of us couldn't give a toss about the budget deficit – let's face it, we don't get much in the way of public services, the refuse-disposal Nazis and parking-wardens can all form an orderly queue at the Job Centre as soon as they like, we never see a bloody policeman and they don't come when we call, our schools are crap, and we know very well that taxes will rise and rise whatever we think, because they always have. The only people who will really feel the pinch are young couples who can't get a mortgage, and the greedy sods who caused all this fuss in the first place – and we don't mean the bankers, but the ordinary people who thought it was their God-given right to have a five-bed house with three loos and a jacuzzi, a Beamer and a 4x4 in the drive, and three foreign holidays a year, and couldn't see why borrowing fifty times their annual income might not have been entirely sensible.
And “a new kind of politics”? Don't make me laugh. All that will mean is abolishing hereditary peers, most of whom went to the right kind of school and have outmoded ideas of fair play, stiff upper lip and that sort of rot, and filling their places with unsavoury big-mouths like Baroness Uddin.


No, now that the excitement and uncertainty has died away, it's still all bollocks and we can't afford to relax for a moment. The government may be making the right noises about ID cards, DNA databases and the like, but we can take it as read that the faceless suits who wield the real power will hang on till the bitter end. We still need to kick off about every abuse, expose every bully, raise a voice about every new absurdity. The only difference is that the MPs we'll be writing to are, on the whole, a bit younger. Let's hope they came out of our rotten school system able to read our letters (oh no, silly me, most of them went to public schools so that's all right).

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