Voting to harm, with fingers crossed

At the time he sacked himself over Europe, John Major famously said he could trust the Parliamentary Conservative Party to re-elect him (notwithstanding that he'd labelled a number of the 'bastards', of course) because they were perhaps 'the most sophisticated electorate in the world' For those not around in 1994, he got back in, but the effects were so catastrophic that his party were turfed out of office in 1997 and it took them until last Thursday to win another election in their own name - even then, they only ended up with three more MPs than Major's final majority of nine when he lost office. If - and the evidence is slight - Tory MPs of 1994 vintage were sophisticated, a sizeable chunk of the 24% who voted them back into office last week are anything but. For example, who would vote for a party that told the electorate they were going to make swingeing cuts, but then refused - either in the manifesto or in debate - to reveal how much or where the reductions would be made: that's not a leap of faith, it's blind stupidity, placing trust in an arrogant group of politicians whose social class and family backgrounds are far removed from many who voted for them, or the people who will suffer most from the cuts. On justice, we now face a similar issue. For the second time, Cameron has appointed a non-lawyer to hold the Ministry of Justice/Lord Chancellor portfolio. But this time, the former-journo, Michael Gove, has been charged with fast-tracking the abolition of the Human Rights Act. In 100 days, we are told, the Daily Mail/Sun/Express-led charge against the European Convention on Human Rights (drafted by a Tory Home Secretary at the behest of Churchill no less), will be replaced by a British Bill of Rights, that will - in a reconditioned phrase stolen from 'new' Labour without a sense of irony 'bring rights home'. Except it won't. Before the 1998 Act, we had common law civil liberties, which were enforceable largely at the whim/pleasure of the judiciary, without a stable basis on statutory law. Voting for Cameron on Thursday looks to me, on the basis of these two examples, to be the most dangerous act of self-loathing by an ill-informed or highly partisan electorate that believes it won't ever suffer the misfortune of ill-health or job loss, that its pensions are large and secure, and that its rights can be entrusted to a Murdoch-beholden journalist turned right-wing neo-con politician. And they've inflicted this on the rest of us. Lemmings show more sense.