Given that most readers will have voted by the time this magazine next appears, we have no hesitation in now urging them to vote Conservative. This is no time for dwelling on any deficiencies in Tory personnel or programmes. Nor is it a time for bashing Mr Blair and his clapped-out, deceitful, nannying and discredited government. It is time to vote Conservative in a spirit of optimism and confidence, not least because the Tories are the only party remotely interested in the democratic freedoms of this country.
The Labour manifesto makes clear that a third Blair government would complete the work of wrecking the House of Lords and imposing the elective dictatorship of the Commons. If you believe that we need a proper revising chamber (and seldom have its virtues been more clearly seen than in the passage of Labour’s tyrannical control orders), then you should vote Conservative. If you want to restore health to local democracy, and you are fed up with the ludicrous accretion of power to Prescottian regional assemblies, and if you resent the unelected quangocrats who are taking ever more decisions — not least over where to plonk vast new developments in the South East — then you should vote Conservative, because only the Tories will terminate this anti-democratic malarkey and thereby save billions. If you think it infamous that modern Britain should become only the third country, after Hitler’s Germany and Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, to ban hunting with hounds, then you should vote Conservative, because only the Conservatives will restore an ancient and blameless practice. If you want to impose some sense on Britain’s European policy, then you should vote Conservative, to get out of the Common Fisheries Policy, scrap UK membership of the Social Chapter (whose insane prescriptions have appalled even New Labour ministers), keep an independent macro-economic policy and currency, and say no to the further erosions of democracy envisaged in the European constitution.
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