What were you doing ten years ago today?
I was still a member of the Labour party back then, so I took the day off and did some canvassing for them. I think I spent a lot of the day standing outside the polling station collecting polling numbers from people as they voted.
And I watched the TV coverage deep into the small hours of May 2nd. It was thrilling. After eighteen years of Tory rule, things really were going to get better. The next day wandering around Balham, it really did seem like the world was a better place. People were smiling and talking to each other. Everyone was completely blown away by the size of the majority. We went away to Brussels for the weekend, but we didn’t really want to go. We wanted to stay in London and soak in the atmosphere of the new age that was dawning.
It didn’t last long though. Within months the Labour government was piling disappointment upon disappointment. And whilst I still believe that the country would have been worse off under the Tories for the last ten years, at time it’s really hard to persuade myself of that.
The list of the Labour government’s trangressions could (and, no doubt, will) fill books. We’ll all have our own personal last straw when we realised that the party had forgotten its traditional supporters. For me it was their behaviour over the London Mayoral elections. That was when I tore up my membership card.
It could have been so different. Tonight I shall watch my video of the BBC’s election coverage, flick through the pages of Were You Still Up For Portillo? and remember what might have been.
To be fair, Labour did introduce the minimum wage, and probably saved schools and hospitals from total destruction. Then again, there’s Iraq, cash for peerages, David Kelly, spin and lies via the Dodgy Dossier, privatisation and the PFI, and more besidesMaybe there really isn’t a difference between the parties these days. As Tony Benn says, people feel like they are being managed, not represented. And I don’t see anyone willing to change that.
If there were local elections here tomorrow, I think I would hold my nose and vote Tory, just to give Labour a bloody nose. Yes, they’ve pissed me off that much.