Vote Early or Late. But Only Vote Once.

My plea for electoral fraud to be low will naturally be ignored. I am not convinced that this election is going to be safe, and the fact that 20,000 people in Blackburn have requested postal ballots sounds incredibly suspicious.

But all we can do is make sure we cast our vote. I will be voting later and will take great pleasure in voting for Liberal Democrats, as I have said I would all along. I believe they have run a generally positive campaign, and the reaction Charles Kennedy gets is pretty good. It is possible that a little too much time was spent on Iraq in the closing days and not enough promoting their policies, but it's too late for that now. I urge you all to not waste this opportunity to restrict Blair. We all know what is coming in this next Parliament: ID cards, more "anti-terror" legislation, further privatisation and marketisation of education and the NHS, worsening social inequality and who knows what more international excursions are planned.

New Labour is not the party of Attlee, Wilson, Callaghan or even Kinnock. Kier Hardie would be turning in his grave at the way New Labour has turned its back on its roots. Regardless of the grassroots of the party at the moment, they have no control over the top. It is quite simply a party being lead from the front. It is therefore wrong to support New Labour because you think that "they're not all like that". I know that. Everyone knows that. But what matters is the 400 odd MPs they elect. The rest of the party is almost an irrelevance. They will not be writing the laws. They will not be executing them. Vote for what you can see - a sham party obsessed with authoritarianism - not for what you think Labour are. The two do not match, and they will never match while Tony is in power. They simply want power for the sake of it. They do not have a grand vision for the furtherment of society.

This is the last chance the British people will get to rid ourselves of him. New Labour is a sinister machine, desperate to cling onto power and desperate to have another whopping majority. We cannot allow this to happen. By the next election, so many more the freedoms we are used to in a liberal democracy will be curtailed in the name of protecting "the most important liberty: the right to life". Well excuse me for wanting to protect freedom of speech and freedom of assembly. What use is life if we are all zombies with no thought or ability to do anything about our objections?

Once political freedoms have gone, they don't come back. While we're in this perpetual state of war against an abstract noun, it is not in the interests of New Labour to let the people run wild and free. They can curtail all the liberties they like and the British people don't seem to mind. One day they will wake up and understand why the few of us concerned about these things spend our time endlessly worried about the quality of British democracy. Accept it. The war on terror has no ending. Habeas corpus has been suspended. Do you really think any government of any colour in the future is ever going to say, "The war on terror is over! We are victorious! And now you can have all your political freedoms back and we promise never to house arrest you again."

It's time to get real. This is the last chance to do so.

I shall now finish this general election blog with a quote from George Orwell's 1984. It is scarily relevant to our current situation and serves as a warning of the fact that we are slowly sleepwalking into a police state. It is a superb book and I highly recommend it. Beware of democratically elected and fully legitimised dictatorships.

"The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power. Not wealth or luxury or long life or happiness: only power, pure power... We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means, it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power. Now do you begin to understand me?"

George Orwell, 1984

Vote wisely...