austinmitchellelectiondiary2019

For the Fallen: my sympathy. That’s about all you’ll get as the arc lights are switched off your supporters drift away, the IPSA money tap dries and the staff who’ve served your every whim depart clutching their P45s.The   constituents you’ve served so faithfully, worked so hard for, listened to their witterings moans and problems, show no gratitude have already forgotten you. They won’t even recognise you if you’re daft enough ever to come back and at the going down of the sun and in the morning they won’t remember you. What ever you’ve said about partnership, uniting for change and standing together there’s no sentimentality in politics. It’s over .You’re just another person reduced from press releases to tweets. Couldn’t have happened to a more promising contender and certainly shouldn’t have happened to you .It wouldn’t if you’d had better support, if your leader had recognised your ability, had time to listen to your ideas, strategies and warnings, and not go...

Elections mean hoping for the best but not knowing what’s coming. I hoped for a Labour government but unlike the    enthusiastic Momentumers never expected it because I thought a narrow Tory majority more likely. I was as wrong as everyone else. There’ll now be a thousand explanations of what went wrong. Hundreds of claims to have been the author of Boris’s victory, and screeds from pontificating pundits .But it was really simple. Labour lost because of three things, all of which I predicted    without realising   the scale of any. The first was Jeremy. He held his own in the debates but never took off with the public, partly because he’ll never live down his past which was fertile soil for   horror stories of treason, betrayal and support for revolting revolutionaries.     Jeremy is a perfectly nice man but rather wooden and certainly no showman like Boris. If the successful politician is someone you’d like to have a beer with, few w...

STOP THE MESS ; CHANGE THE SYSTEM The one thing that’s clear about this election is that we need to change our electoral system. It can’t cope with splintered parties, governments with no majority,   multi party politics and issues which divide the electorate along different lines to the great party division between the have mores and the have lesses. Politics have changed but the electoral system hasn’t and the result is chaos. Former party leaders denounce their successors and suggest voting for someone else.   Conservatives have left the party   to join the   Liberals or stand as independents.   Blairites who once dominated the Labour Party despair about Jeremy Corbyn and some show up in their real colours   as trendy Liberals not proletarian socialists . The Labour Party which once wanted to come out of Europe now loved it while the Tories who took us in want out. What a mess! Even worse the Liberals have discovered that the soggy ...

CONFESSIONS OF A BAFFLED BREXITEER. The basic choice at this confusing election is between “Get Brexit done” and “Get austerity stopped” That means that however many minor Parties are now in the fray it is essentially a choice between the Conservatives and Labour. That poses a real problem for your’s truly. I voted against joining the European Union in 1975 and have urged withdrawal ever since . It’s brought no real benefits but has become a drain and a burden on our fragile economy which   now cuts us off from   the growing world Yet I’ve   supported Labour ever since I joined the party in 1956. I did so because Labour worked for   the masses not the classes. It tilts the social balances to the people and   built Britain’s good society of full employment,fairness, welfare, health and education which Britain enjoyed until Margaret Thatcher demolished it. Today the choice is less clear cut. The Tories support Brexit and propose to turn t...

A week to go before the election and the know all pundits, pollsters and political papers seem to have decided the result for us. Their prophesy? Boris wins wIth a majority big enough to govern,Labour loses the gains it made in the flush of "Oh, oh, oh Jeremy Corbyn "enthusiasm and Jeremy is accused   of the most horrendous crimes such as not listening to the Queen’s Christmas message. Meanwhile Boris remains remorselessly cheerful as he   tells impossible untruths about the paradise to come The Liberals, still under the curse of the coalition, stay where they were. Down. And in a desperate attempt to get the attention of a bored electorate all parties shower out money and promises to a nation which doesn’t believe any of them.   The parties are behaving as the prophets prescribe . Labour   falls into to a pointless argument over whether and when Jeremy Corbyn should resign after the defeat, Boris   talks of handing out tax cuts on day one ...

Once you let an election out of the cage   it  goes anywhere, eats and pisses on all parties. It can’t be kept on a lead and taken for a nice quiet walk   towards whatever destiny the Prime Minster who called it intends. Boris hoped it would be a rally of Brexiteers to stop Brexit and that the people would reward him for standng up to the EU and getting a marginally better deal than Theresa had managed. The Tory Party was to emerge as a patriotic British, populist party rallying the nation against immigration, subservience to Brussels and a lot of European busybodies telling   a great nation what to do Labour pretended to want an election but didn’t really for various reasons like common sense, because it was split on Brexit, Jeremy wasn’t popular, it wasn’t ready and the Blair legacy still   divided the party between Blairite moderates and Corbynite radicals. Corbyn only came round to an election in the hope that he could consolidate his p...