As if we needed them!
Taking a leaf out of George Bush’s book, today the Conservative party leader Michael Howard announced that he’d back a change in the law on abortion.
Now, Michael Howard having an opinion on abortion is no bad thing – I’m rather glad that he’s concerned. What is a HUGE problem is him turning it into an election issue. This is clearly in response to observing how single-issue voting helped the right in the US – by turning the election into a conflict about abortion, gay marriage and stem-cell research, the republicans mobilised millions of conservative religious people in the US, who considered those issues more important than protecting the poor and the enviroment…
The lunacy of Howard’s pronouncement here is that Abortion has always been a free vote in UK parliment!!! – it’s never been a partisan issue. The various lobby groups involved are cross party, and no party has ever applied the whip to try and get a particular result.
So his motivation is clearly to divide opinion and paint Labour as child-hating murderers… What a loser, what a party full of losers.
I really really wish we had a stronger opposition in UK politics. Labour have got very complacent and started doing some really stupid things (the war being the most obvious example) – a strong opposition is good for the democratic process. But Michael Howard is such a waste of time. I’d hate to see the Tories get back in in the UK, but I’d like to see them push Labour harder than they are.
this is so lame – the US election was a farce because ‘people of faith’ were blackmailed into supporting a party that embodied virtually no ‘christian values’ but talked the talk of ‘personal morality’ – they give tax breaks to the super rich and make life ever harder for the poor, pollute the enviroment, crap on the rest of the planet, wage unjust wars and are fronted by a moron, but they were elected by scaring right-wing so-called-christians into voting against abortion, gay marriage and stem cell research.
Those are all really important issues, but not deciding calls in an election, especially not a UK one.
Email your local MP and tell them just how crap this is.
Soundtrack – Kristin Korb/Todd Johnson, ‘Get Happy’; Tom Waits, ‘Foreign Affairs’.