Gardener wrote:Hmm.. that's an interesting question. I guess I vote because the other options are worse?
Precisely.
I may still be naive - at the tender age of 53 - but I would prefer to vote for someone and something I believed in, rather than having no choice other than to vote for the 'least-worst option'.
That's problematic for me because since I first became interested in politics as a teenager, thirty-seven years ago, I have found little to believe in from the Tories or Labour. I vote Lib Dem, not so much as a protest vote per se, but more as a way of having it recorded that not everyone in whichever constituency I happen to be in at the time, or in the country as a whole, is either Tory or Labour.
Having said that, there ARE positive things I like about the current Tories. They've put a lot of money into the NHS, they've spent money on the Military, particularly the Navy, and they seem economically trustworthy ?
I've commented elsewhere that
whichever party is in government, throwing money at a problem is little more than an attempt to salve people's consciences and divert attention away from having to ask ourselves why the problem(s) exist in the first place and whether there are other things we should be doing to rectify the cause(s). It's putting a band aid on a suppurating, infected wound.
Elsewhere on the wonderful world wide web, people think I'm passionately and ideologically anti-Tory, but I'm not.
But I'm 'anti-' two things that make the Tories an unnatractive option for me; authoritarianism and prioritising the economy over people. Francis Bacon's aphorism that money is a good servant but a bad master is what I'm on about in respect of the latter. One only has to look at the number of right-wing folk on both sides of the pond whose attitude to the pandemic was essentially, "I don't give a fuck about people dying...this lockdown is making me lose money!", to see why I dislike the notion of money being our master rather than our servant.
None of that however makes me pro-Labour, because whilst they are more inclined to think about the causes of problems than the Tories, their solutions rest on an ideological footing that is flawed in my view. Like religious scripture, socialist theory was a product of its time...and time has moved on, to the point where neither are wholly relevant. There are still pearls of wisdom to be found in both but as a universally applicable ideology, neither are suitable to the modern world. To its credit, socialist theory at least has the ability to question itself and change with the times and Marx's view of class as being the individual's economic relationship with the mode and ownership of production still has some relevance, but just like pearls of wisdom in the Koran have been contaminated by Jihadi extremism, so pearls of wisdom in socialist theory have been contaminated by functional socialism in practice.