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Election 2019 Why I'm Voting Labour: Martin Rowson, cartoonist

A Johnson government would worsen the ramshackle atrocity the British state has degenerated into

ALTHOUGH sometimes it’s been with gritted teeth, I’ve always voted Labour except for in local elections in 2004 when Blair’s Iraq adventure drove me into the arms of Lewisham’s Greens.

This time I have no qualms, as this is precisely the kind of manifesto I’ve been waiting for for decades.

True, as a satirist I’ve had some serious issues with some of Corbyn’s more — let’s be polite — enthusiastically intolerant fans. Nonetheless, as an articulation of the best and probably only way to redress the monstrous injustices and inequalities 40 years of neoliberalism have added to all the previously existing ones, this manifesto gets my vote.

More crucially, it seriously engages with the best ways to confront the climate crisis, by offering a new Green industrial revolution while reining in the mad greed that goes hand in hoof with the reckless environmental vandalism that’s helped make so very few people so very, very rich.

Those are the positive reasons to vote Labour. The other obvious reason, and why I’d vote for Tony Blair gaffer-taped to Hugh Gaitskell if I had to, is that Boris Johnson truly manifests all you need to know about the contempt in which the Tories hold us all.

I remember when I was doing my Politics A level over 40 years ago, the textbook quoted an anonymous Labour voter from decades before, saying he’d vote Labour even if they put a pig up for election.

Well, now the Tories have, almost literally. I often doubt that Johnson is actually definable as human, as he’s comprehensively lacking any of those precisely human traits we recognise in each other, like empathy.

Like Trump, I seriously suspect that he probably doesn’t even quite understand what other people are or what their purpose is beyond giving him our attention and applauding gratefully
each time he pratfalls over his cock again.

There’s no point now in cataloguing his narcissism, neediness, irresponsibility, laziness, complacency or even how the Tories’ insultingly dreadful campaign has exposed him as even being shit at being shit.

He is the ultimate manifestation of the Tories’ trajectory into an inchoate grunt simpering from our poor, battered nation’s id.

A Johnson government would exponentially worsen the ramshackle atrocity the British state has degenerated into already. Vote Labour to stop him, as well as voting to save us all.

 

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