General Election

This is my 19th General Election and I have by me the short 1944 book “Why Not Trust the Tories?” by Aneurin Bevan, who founded our NHS. “In each election power passes to the people”, he wrote, “and each time they hand it back again to the same people who held it before.” That mould was broken in 1945 thanks to socialists like Bevan and to the Army Bureau of Current Affairs, and the NHS was set up, against Tory opposition, by Clement Attlee’s Labour Government as part of our finest social structure since at least the Reformation.

Elections today differ from then, before TV killed the local hustings, when people turned out in hundreds to hear local candidates in schools or halls; so now we risk paying far too much attention to the media that presume to tell us that the economy is the big issue. That’s for us voters to decide, and many say welfare and wage-levels come first, important though the industrial financial agenda is. Our Tories say Britain is booming, then contradict this by claiming that austerity is still needed; but what’s the point of revival if the very rich corner virtually all its fruit?

The Coalition Millionaire’s Cabinet has had five years to contain the deficit, but preferred to cut surtax on their well-heeled supporters. Further cruel and callous cuts in benefit to the disabled and their carers are now openly pledged.

When the popular football club owner Karren Brady said reversing Tory largesse to the millionaires would harm UK prosperity I wrote to her saying Attlee gained post-war recovery with 97 per cent surtax. No reply came. She’s one of the 103 business folk who attacked Labour in the press on April 1. These people use big money to try and hijack democracy, but they haven’t been elected and can’t represent Britain’s “bosses”, of whom they form only 0.02 per cent - which means that if say Liverpool football ground is packed with entrepreneurs only one would sign the letter.