Yes but being one of the people caring about this, and not voting, you’re doing your bit to help Lab get a vast majority, and a giant Blairite smile, no?

Why don’t Labour and the Democratic Party in the US simply merge and be done with it? The rationalizations for total capitulation in both parties have become completely indistinguishable.

I think it’s more that we aren’t electing a Head of State in semi-plebiscitary manner (even though Blair probably thinks we are).

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For example, I live in the most marginal Labour seat with a LibDem as main challenger
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I live in a very marginal Labour seat with Lib Dem second, I’m doing the same as you, and ignoring George Monbiot’s call for me to vote for, e.g. Plaid Cymru. (Does he know anything at all about Wales and Scotland?!)

I’ve had it with this “don’t risk letting the Tories in” moral and emotional blackmail; how bad does it have to get before people stop saying that? (Don’t answer.)

NB: today it’s been reported that Michael Howard’s anti-immigrant kick isn’t helping him anyway—presumably because New Labour’s already so right-wing on it.

I think this is fundamentally right. The Blair government has lied to a degree that it’s important not only that this particular government not be rewarded for their behaviour but also that a message be sent to politicians in general that this is not acceptable.

Furthermore, this government has led a concerted assault on civil liberties which has more than outweighted the genuine achievments, and there are several, that they’ve produced.

I couldn’t in all good conscience vote for them and the threat of a Tory victory doesn’t really fill me with fear.

In fact, if I were being utterly cynical about it, a Tory victory, which is incredibly unlikely, might be the one thing that’d reinvigorate the political left in this country. The mainstream centre-left has utterly failed to oppose authoritarian and reactionary measures that would have had them screaming in rage if they’d been enacted by a Tory government simply because they’ve been the product of a Labour administration.

That’s may be a fair point on some issues, I think, but at least on the specific one of immigration and asylum, I think the (woefully misinformed) national concensus is far enough to the right at the moment that Labour won’t move back to the left until they see that it’s politically expedient.

I can definitely understand your reasons for sticking it to Blair, and I agree with most of them. But I wonder if your above quote doesn’t underestimate the power of rhetoric to shape national debates and, ultimately, effect policy.

If rhetoric leads the majority of the nation to believe that the UK is over-run with bloody foreigners who are here to steal benefits, then policy is very likely to be affected, and people are more likely to get sent back to Zimbabwe or some other deathtrap. Prospect magazine had an article on this in its most recent issue, I think, with a real-life example of someone who was only rescued at the appeals stage.

In the US, rhetoric has led to abortion rights being lost, creationism being taught in schools, and, as Matt Yglesias has rightly harped on about, most young adults believing that social security is sure to collapse within their lifetime. Enough people have said it enough times, so they honestly do believe it.

I’ve been in the UK for five years, and as an immigrant I’m probably a bit more sensitive to this aspect of the national debate than I am to some others. I think that without a doubt the tenor has shifted to the right in the last half decade, and opinions about immigrants and asylum seekers alike have become more vituperative. And I think that is very likely to affect national policy, if only by encouraging the ruling party to play to the crowd by being overly strict on immigration and asylum. That is, Tory success on the immigration issue will encourage a cynical Labour party to move further to the right – thus we get two parties spouting largely the same crap. And when that happens, real people suffer.

By the way, I’m definitely not saying that people should hold their noses and vote Labour. I just think that people tend to underestimate the negative impacts of not voting at all.

On the other hand, Tony’s ability to play to the crowd on issues like this is partly a function of being able to ignore large chunks of his own party because of the size of his, er… majority. It obviously depends somewhat on the MPs in your individual electorate, but voting Tory could actually end up pushing Labour leftwards.

This is “always keep a hold of Nurse” reasoning; the trouble is, there will always be the possibility of “something worse”, so you can quite easily find yourself in Hell, one tiny step at a time.

Rhetoric is annoying, but it doesn’t kill anyone; deporting them back to places like Zimbabwe does, and as far as I can see both parties are more or less the same as one another on that score.

For me, it’s the lies; if Blair gets back in with a thumping majority, we will have established the precedent that these days it’s OK to take the country into a war on the basis of a prospectus that would have you banned as a company director if you’d tried to raise money with it on the London Stock Exchange. I would risk quite a lot in terms of policy outcomes to establish the point that it isn’t. The Tories don’t have much of a chance near me so it doesn’t really arise for me personally but I absolutely would not rule it out.

And that’s all there is to it.

And I know that Labour has a lot to answer for on this issue, but I’m fairly certain that they’re just playing to the crowd. As long as this is a hot button issue, then Labour will talk tough on it. But if the country gets a bit of perspective, Labour will dampen down their rhetoric, and hopefully treat asylum and immigration as real policy issues to be analysed and addressed in an intelligent, fact-based fashion, rather than as political footballs.