I’M YOUR typical floating voter. I have at various times in my life voted for all three major parties.
While a student, I campaigned for David Alton, when he fought in Mossley Hill. Despite being named after a leafy suburb, the constituency included a large slice of inner-city Liverpool. One baking hot day, I climbed to the top floor of a tenement block. I was sent by Mr Alton’s campaign manager to knock on the door of the only registered voter in an otherwise boarded-up block to ask her to cast her vote for Mr Alton.
When I got there, she spent ten minutes blaming the Liberal candidate for all her housing woes, so I took that as a no. As I walked back towards the staircase, a door to a boarded-up flat opened and two drunk young men emerged, shouting threats as they ran towards me. I legged it. I returned to street level to find Mr Alton using a broom to sweep up the glass that a few minutes earlier had been his car’s windscreen. A brick was nestling in the front passenger seat.
When I was living in London, I helped keep John Major in power, principally because I didn’t trust Neil Kinnock to manage the economy. Then, five years later, while living in St Albans, Hertfordshire, I helped eject Peter Lilley from what used to be a safe Tory seat principally because both he and the equally strident Michael Portillo were busily making Britain a more divided society.
Nowadays, the Liberal Democrats are to the left of Labour, while Labour and the Conservatives battle it out for middle- ground voters.
I would define my place on the political spectrum as somewhere to the right of Labour and left of the Conservatives. I have a firm belief that free markets and free enterprise are the best and most efficient way of managing the economy, while at the same time wanting to see enough spent on health and education.
Yet, while both parties pay lip service to the middle ground, they act more left or right wing than they talk. The longer either party stays in power, the more they venture away from the centre ground, so that, by the end of the Conservatives’ fourth term, Mr Portillo was denouncing single mums and various other groups he thought of as scroungers and today “New” Labour has broken its promise not to raise income tax.
Worse still, both parties resort to stealth. For example, the combination of the housing market renewal initiative, whereby billions of pounds have been invested in social housing, and John Prescott’s restrictions on planning permission for private homes, amounts to an unannounced housing policy.
Worse still, Gordon Brown is a spent force, while David Cameron may prove to be the biggest purveyor of flim- flam ever.
And yet abstention isn’t an option either. Our economic recovery is tentative. There is clear evidence that industry order books are picking up while unemployment has not reached the levels previously feared. Yet growth is still low. Whoever comes to power next month needs to drop the dogmatism and use a bit of common sense to guide the British economy along the road to stronger recovery.
ONE sign that things are recovering is the latest set of figures from Liverpool John Lennon Airport.
A 15% rise in passenger traffic in the first quarter represents an impressive rebound and bodes well for the future.
It shows what a strong market place JLA operates in, a market place that could achieve even further growth in the months and years ahead.
