New Forest; A left-free region 

Tawfiq Chahbourne

I live in an area where there will be no parish, town, district or county elections this year. The next parish, town and district elections will be in 2007; and the next county elections will be in 2009. Nevertheless, here is my report. Someone might even find it useful!

As some of you know, I currently live in a town set in the beautiful New Forest. And in this reactionary outback it's a straight battle between the Tories and the Lib Dems. If it were sunnier, I'd be tempted to refer to it as redneck country. My constituency MP is Desmond Swayne (New Forest West), who fought in Iraq with the TA. Amongst all the carnage and death, Swayne happily reminisces that he lost a great deal of excess weight while in Iraq. A nice bonus of the war. Quiz time: How many Iraqis needed to die before Desmond Swayne reached his ideal weight? Another local MP (New Forest East) is Dr Julian Lewis, whose hero is Anwar Sadat, which, when you think about it, actually makes a lot of sense. Lewis is so rightwing that it took IDS to spot his hitherto hidden talents. I once interrogated him about Iraq and the "war on terror" on a train to London. Strangely, I found him to be an extremely amiable man! Something I can't say of nearly every Labour person I come across. Lewis's arguments were unbelievably bad. I felt I had bumped into someone who had just read Kissinger's oeuvre.

Labour does not exist as a force in the New Forest, not that I would vote for the Blairite-Brownite automata on offer. For me at least, it would be a different story if a Jeremy Corbyn or a Bob Marshall-Andrews was running in any election, be it general or local. At the last general election Labour received 16 percent of the vote in my constituency - about three times less than Desmond Swayne, who can be seen on summer days driving a Morris Minor sporting a union jack. (Why is it that the most affluent and powerful people in society believe they're the most powerless, even "oppressed"? "Bloody political correctness," is their delusional cry to the "oppression" they don't face.)

In neighbouring New Forest East, Labour got about 12 percent of the vote. UKIP are a presence but not a particularly threatening one given that they're up against Swayne and Lewis, two seasoned shock troops of hard-right Euro-scepticism. I don't think I've ever come across anything by the Greens, a party I would probably vote for in a Left-free area. I've never come across anything with a hint of social democracy, let alone socialism. I'd certainly know if I did - I'd suffer strokes on both sides of my body (judging by the way every part of his body droops symmetrically, Harry Redknapp seems to have been struck down in such fashion). Southampton, about 17 miles away, apparently had a rather lively Socialist Alliance. At a local level, though, I believe things are even worse for Labour (haha), if that is to be the spurious definition of the Left. Often they don't even run; and they're usually trounced when they do (haha).

It says much about how far the "centre ground" has moved in the last thirty years that the beliefs of a "one nation" Tory from that era would now be considered subversive "preversion" (see Dr Strangelove), even something requiring a McCarthyite commission. So given the choice between the Tories and the Lib Dems, I'd probably run a hot bath and position an electrical appliance precariously beside the tub. In life, though, there aren't only two choices and one can cast a "protest vote" that will not be so considered.

Though the Lib Dems did oppose the war (very half-heartedly, one must point out: "It is not yet time for war," their equidistant "antiwar" placards stated), that would have made me ponder that a vote for them is not an entirely stupid thing to do. Silly but not stupid. Actually, that could be a new political soundbite. We've had "Forward not Back", "Future not Past", why not "Silly not stupid"? Things have, however, moved on and the Lib Dems are pro-occupation. Like the "private lives" of Mark Oaten and Simon Hughes, here is more equidistance. "Ming the mirthless", the Lib Dem's new leader, was apparently for the war in private, is vehemently pro-occupation and is essentially a half-wet (half-wit?) Tory who will push the Lib Dems to the hard rightwing economic "centre ground", fearing a "credibility" issue. Three pro-occupation Tory parties is rather too much choice, I'd say.

These are the electoral conundrums lefties face all the time. They're doubly worse in a Left-free area. Vote for the lesser evil? I don't think holding one's nose and doing so is an answer. In any case, it is becoming almost impossible to recognise the lesser evil these days. It is not uncommon for a Tory to stand out as someone who is less extreme than Labour. For example, Kenneth Clarke's politics are certainly a whole lot better than everyone in the current Blair cabinet (even our alleged saviour Hilarious "Hilary" Benn) and most Labour MPs. I'll vote Green if the they stand, which they probably won't. Otherwise, I'll spoil my ballot in a protest that will go down as "the fool can't even fill out his voting paper". However, on the up side, it all adds up to one thing: it means that I don't have to do any of that pesky activism. Hoorah! On second thoughts, that's actually terrible.
 

 

 

April 2006

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