My futile Lib Dem vote
that public sector net debt has risen under the Conservatives. Go figure.
This is no middle-class indulgence, or an act of youthful rebellion. My friends and I who live in London sometimes pay upwards of one third of our income on rent alone, which makes saving impossible and the prospect of living like a student into our thirties very real. With its pledge to build a million more homes in five years, I would be tangibly better off with Labour in charge.
Mr Corbyn, in stark contrast to Theresa May, appeals to the young on a personal level. Grime4Corbyn, the election movement which saw rap artists endorsing the Labour leader, was powerful not because we hang on Stormzy’s every word, but because we could identify with the oftenoverlooked section of society it represented.
For a long time, we have felt we are being excluded from the decisionmaking in this country. Brexit, which only a quarter of 18-24-year-olds voted for, is being driven by the concerns of a much older, less metropolitan bloc. Some days it seems the Daily Mail is Britain’s most influential think-tank, rather than a newspaper.
Yes, Mr Corbyn’s links to unsavoury groups and individuals should be challenged, but he is no antisemite. And, while he may not like Israel, his expressions of concern for the interests of ethnic minorities feel genuine.
Above all, he portrayed himself as an outsider. And in today’s Britain that’s exactly what young people are, too.
TO CONSERVATIVE voters upset by last week’s election result, I say: you think you’re anxious? Try being a Brexit-hating, centre-left, political moderate. We are lonely, haunted beasts who for years have been dragging ourselves to the polling stations without really knowing why we are going or what we are going to do when we get there.
In our nihilism, we have tended to vote Liberal Democrat — but with as much enthusiasm as a supermarket cashier greeting their 1,000th customer of the day.
Our depression dates back to the accession of Ed Miliband to the Labour leadership. It was he who kick-started the party’s slide towards a hard-left populism that embraces the worst politics-graduate’s clichés about capitalism and Israel.
Along came Jeremy Corbyn, the “friend” of Hamas and Hezbollah and an admirer of Hugo Chavez, whose grasp of how the UK economy pays its way appears poor at best.
Then there was the EU referendum, disaster of disasters, and the enraging sight of Conservative arsonists walking away from the burning house — and Mr Corbyn fluffing and fudging his response.
We sensed the euphoria of the Brexiteers and last week’s Labour voters, and feel many voters are angry and desperate, grasping at snake-oil solutions to their genuine problems. A hard Brexit is now our overriding concern, since we believe it will increase the inequalities and the anger that have underpinned the successes of both Mr Corbyn and the Leave campaign.
The Lib Dems are not an easy party to vote for. They have harboured the most bone-headed anti-Israel activists such as David Ward and Jenny Tonge. And their former leader Tim Farron was probably best suited to be a city councillor. On the other hand, they are the only party that pledges to reverse the Tories’ counter-productive cuts to tax credits.
The Lib Dems also made the ultimate self-sacrifice by partnering with the Conservatives to provide stability at a time when the UK was rocking from the financial crisis and desperately needed some grown-ups in the room. As patriotic pragmatists, we applauded them.
They are as likely to govern the country as the moon is to fall to earth — but they are the anti-Brexit party, in all their glorious futility. So we voted for them. In all our glorious futility.