The Final Election Diary comes totally from Edis (saugatojas), without my distanced and rather irrelevant comments that can add nothing to his direct experience gained from the hard basic work of politics in the UK of canvassing voters face-to-face.
I will not reveal all that Edis has said to me but there is, behind the guarded exterior of what he has written, an indication of some real anticipation. Edis has caught election fever and his constituency will be one I shall be watching closely as the results come in tonight.
Less than a day to go as I write. It is a curious business being a front-line campaigner on the doorsteps as we don’t see a lot of the campaign as others do. I have seen none of the Party Political Broadcasts for example and few of the televised interviews. I do however see the expressions on peoples faces, hear what some voters are actually saying, and know some of the hidden data I can’t talk about as it breaches declarations of secrecy.
I am rather pleased by the way things are going as seen from my blinkered position.
One annoyance in my locality is a close to home ‘defection’. The hard disc on my computer has gone Tory. On Sunday it started to crash in the middle of sessions insisting that the boot sector was bad and demanding all sorts of extreme action to revert to previous states. Well so far these threats have been ‘terminological inexactitudes’ as the machine always reboots OK. Also it is enforcing a restrictive immigration policy, refusing for long periods to log on to the INTERNET. I suspect Something Of The Night has slowed down my hard disc. Overheating CPUs possibly.
Living in an overheated Tory world is hugely unpleasant I can assure you.
As a consequence this is being forwarded to you using communal resources, including the magnificent new Library at the Open University. Long live Public Services.
Back in the virtual world of reality LibDems continue to pick up support just below the poll radars. The national figures don’t mean a lot when it comes to individual seat results though. As noted before there is a lot of churn hidden by the apparent stable figures. One interesting development I have seen is that people disgusted by Blair enough to consider voting Tory are wavering a bit on this now that the moment of decision comes. Perhaps they have hard disc problems too.
One indication that the LibDems are in serious player positions is the attention from our opponents, though we are not sure who exactly vandalised my candidate’s car last week or sent the series of anonymous death threats over the last few months. The car story is appearing in a local newspaper today just in time for Thursday. Nationally there have been some extraordinary assaults on LibDems. Up in Sheffield we have the most barking example yet. The Tories (and I assure you this really has gone out under official Tory auspices) paid for an item in a local freesheet newspaper saying that Libdems wanted to impose a Dog Tax, and the aim of this was to force dog owners to turn their dogs onto the streets so they could be rounded up by entrepreneurs and turned into Haggisses – dogmeat according to this tale being what Haggis is made from. We are hoping they reprint this one in Scotland.
Not to be outdone Labour in the shape of Blair personally denounced ‘The Liberal Democrats soft policy on Drugs’. The core of the policy attacked being actually what the Labour Government implemented 18 months age which we supported. The rest of the attack bears no relationship to anything we have said so it appears Labour are relying on the Rabid Dog tendency in the media (the parts unfit even to become Tory style Haggis) to go on a moral panic before facts can be checked.
This is one of the clearest examples of New Labour’s Boggart personality. Readers of the Harry Potter books will recall the magical pests called Boggarts. They are shape shifters who when seen by someone assume the aspect of what frightens that person most. Nobody knows what a Boggart looks like when it is alone, though Labour supporters fondly assume Boggart Labour really looks like Gordon Brown. Boggart Labour however has a subtle variation on this. When seen by a potential conservative voter it assumes the shape of a stereotyped Tory Allarmist policy thus occupying the ground that Tories might otherwise occupy and leaving Tories with nothing much to talk about.
There are big frustrations being a party that raises issues the others (mostly) don’t want to talk about. Not much said in this campaign about global warming despite this being the most serious threat we face. Not much said about the threat to our civil liberties. The press cannot really handle distinctive campaign issues, it needs everyone to bunch into a narrow agenda. So it goes. But we have tried to bring in positive proposals and maybe some of these will be developed later.
Of course despite us having put out a whole range of pertinent policies some Boggart fellow travellers are talking about the LibDems being a single issue party on the subject of the Iraq war. Well the war is being talked about, it is swaying some votes, and it wont go away in the next Parliament.
I know the result I want tomorrow (ignoring the miracle result of a LibDem overall majority) and yes the chances of getting it are rather slim. I hope the Tories get a thrashing and Labour gets a fright. Best result feasible is LibDems as second largest party, Labour cut back substantially. I suspect though that the actual result will be an absolutely classic case study for supporters of electoral reform as seat by seat outcomes will be a lottery in many cases. We could double our vote and lose half our seats as one example.
But I want at the least a principled opposition that will stand up for our freedoms against the Boggarts. There is no such thing as a wasted vote that establishes and upholds a credible opposition. Whatever the overall outcome and balance of forces the core of such an opposition will be the LibDems and the more there are in Parliament the greater the victory for Britain and for those who ant to protect the freedoms that centuries of Britons have fought for and which our current ‘big two’ parties are apparently willing to sacrifice.
