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Election 2019 Why I'm Voting Labour: Dave Brown, political cartoonist of the year, 2019

ON THURSDAY December 12, I’ll be voting Labour. God knows why, it’s very much against my best interests.

As a satirical political cartoonist I make my living by lampooning those in power and those who seek to govern us. My daily bread depends on being able to strip away the carefully spun and tailored image the politician presents to us to reveal their true corrupt, venal, mendacious, nakedness.

Like the little boy in the fairy tale I point and say: “Look the emperor has no clothes...” though, for effect, I tend to add “...and he has a particularly tiny willy!”

So tell me why the hell would I want a modest, honest, reasonable and respectful man in number 10 when I could have an arrogant, Pinocchio-nosed, forked-tongued racist with his pants on fire?

I mean, where’s the fun in cartooning a man who wants to protect our NHS when I could be drawing Johnson and Trump as a pair of bloodied sawbones hacking the ailing patient to death?

Similarly, why would I want our trains brought back under public control when a top-hatted, blond Fat Controller and his billionaire chums running them off the rails is so much more fun to draw?

Imagine, if Iain Duncan Smith lost his seat to Faiza Shaheen, would the poor and disabled afflicted by universal credit really be better off without my regular depictions of the blood-sucking Nosferatu of Chingford?

It really is too bad of paupers to complain so much. Let them eat foodbank Jaffa cakes I say, it’s a small price if it allows me to lampoon Rees-Mogg and other out-of-touch Tories as Marie Antoinette.

Over the last three years I’ve become really good at drawing cliff edges, do you really want to take that away from me just because working people’s jobs might be dashed on the rocks of a Tory  hard Brexit?

Do you realise how tough my life will be trying to find a visual metaphor for Corbyn’s pragmatism when, with a few strokes of my pen, I can give you Johnson flogging a dead unicorn?

And now I hear that danger to national security, Mr Corbyn, wouldn’t press the nuclear button. What? But my painted mushroom cloud is a thing of beauty! Oh, there might be some “collateral damage” you say, and it might include me…

Well, as I said, against my better judgement I’ll be voting Labour on Thursday December 12.

Bah humbug!

Dave Brown is the political cartoonist for The Independent.

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