Call me insane, but I’m voting Labour

Quite often when I deliver myself of an opinion to a friend or colleague, the reply will come back: ‘Are you out of your mind? I think that is sectionable under the Mental Health Act.’ In fact, I get that kind of reaction rather more often than, ‘Oh, what a wise and sensible idea, Rod, I commend your acuity.’

There is nothing I say, however, which provokes such fervid and splenetic derision, and the subsequent arrival of pacifying nurses, as when I tell people that I intend to vote Labour at the forthcoming general election. When I tell people that, they look at me the way my dog does when I tell her that it is not right to kill cats. It is something quite beyond the parameters of understanding, of comprehension. ‘But you hate them,’ people reply, shaking their heads, and up to a point I have to agree. I do hate them, much of them, or much of what they have become.

The proposition appears genuinely certifiable when I add that I do not actually want Labour to win the election, or at least not in the manner which they are most likely to ‘win’ — i.e., in alliance with the hounds of hell from the Lib Dems and the terrifying, ginger, grasping Picts. In fact, I would rather like Labour to suffer the sort of wipeout in the north of England which the SNP seem well on course to deliver in Scotland (and for similar reasons). That will not happen at this election, but it will assuredly happen at some election not far down the line, so hopelessly estranged has Labour become from the people it was set up to support. It is now the party of middle-class London liberals, its enormous lead in the capital compelling evidence of this.