From Free Life, Issue 26, December 1996
ISSN: 0260 5112

Throughout my time as Editor of this Journal, I have consistently encouraged my readers to vote Conservative, and have promised that I will do so. I doubt if my readers have ever paid the slightest attention to my advice on this or any other matter. Even so, pontificating about how they ought to vote has always flattered my vanity, and may have impressed the book publishers to whom I send Free Life in the hope - never yet disappointed - that they will reward me with a cataract of review copies.

It now flatters my vanity - and, I suppose, soothes my conscience - to say that I am about to break the habit of a lifetime, and will not be voting Conservative at the next general election. And, of course, I encourage my readers - at least, those to whom such advice is not already redundant - to do likewise.

I can no longer accept the betrayal of English Conservative values that we have seen during the past 18 years. When I was young, I believed in Margaret Thatcher. I believed she had a mission to "roll back the frontiers of the State", and to combine what is loosely called social and economic freedom with a strict rule of law. This led me to an indulgence that, while never complete and always diminishing, I now recall with shame. Every so often, her Government would make some wild and unconstitutional law - such as abolishing general verdicts in Coroners' Courts, or forcing us all to wear seatbelts in 1982, or the Video Recordings Act 1984, or the Drug Trafficking Offences Act 1986, or the various Companies Acts and Criminal Justice Acts of the late 1980s. But I chose to regard these as occasional outrages, as blemishes on a generally bright record. Even when, by about 1987, I had realised that her "Victorian Values" were less those of Gladstone than of Joseph Chamberlain, I could steel myself to supporting her by thinking of a Labour Party committed to real socialism.

The second of these excuses has now vanished with the rise of Tony Blair. There is no reason to believe that a Labour Government led by him would be very worse than what we have had under John Major since 1990. It would not tax and spend and borrow more. It would not regulate more. It would be neither more nor less yielding to the demands of Helmut Kohl. There would be a change of rhetoric, and for a while the perception of new faces. But that is all.

Therefore, I feel free to punish these political and moral dwarves who have defiled the name Conservative by claiming it for themselves. These are people who have not so much damaged our free Constitution as smashed it in pieces. The only thing about Old England they still seem to like is the roast beef - and even that they may have ruined with their farming subsidies. They have centralised power. They are abolishing due process of law in criminal cases. They have empowered the Police to burgle our homes while we are out, and to copy documents and plant listening devices. They have nationalised every child in the country and turned parents into mere agents, dismissable at the whim of any unbalanced social worker. They have socialised the economy - not by owning it is the 1940s way, to be sure, but by covering it in an intricate and overlapping set of regulations that lets them shut down any business they dislike.

In the past month alone, they have announced plans to confiscate virtually every handgun and protective knife in the country, thereby leaving us defenceless against them and any lesser predators. They have promised us a criminal register that will contain details of all past convictions, and will open us to more bullying by the State, even as they contract out its running to the sort of computer company from which they look forward to the usual "consultancies" on their retirement from office. In the name of stamping out "sex tourism", they are planning to put us under the same worldwide obligation to obey their laws as only terrorist dictators used to claim. For much the same alleged purpose, they are looking for ways to censor the Internet.

I cannot vote for these people. I cannot hold my nose and advise anyone else to vote for them. I will vote instead for the Referendum Party, and modestly campaign for it. I have yet to be convinced that a referendum on Europe would be a good thing at the moment - our side might easily lose. But whatever else can be said about it, the Referendum Party has one great attraction for me: it is a transparent dustbin for Tory votes. If we stay at home, or vote Labour, it will be hard to prove what we think of John Major and the other traitors and buffoons who presently rule this country. But just imagine the look on their faces as they sit down together the morning after the next election, and work out how many votes they lost in each seat to Sir James Goldsmith's intervention, and how many seats they thereby lost.

This is not victory, I grant. But it is revenge.

Sean Gabb