The Tory Party...

Growing up in Yorkshire, I saw successive Conservative governments destroy large swathes of my beloved home county and its industries, whether it was attacks on the coal mines, the docks, shipbuilding or any other major or light industry that happened to not fit in with their economic vision. 

Consequently, for quite a long time, I held the view that the only good Tory was a dead one.  I've since met Tories that I've liked and been charmed by, so I've decided my adolescent view of the Tory Party and any fucker associated with it may have been a tad extreme.

Now David Cameron and his pals have been re-elected, though, I'm starting to wonder if it really was all that extreme in the first place. 

Most of them don't seem to give a shit about anyone but themselves and their monied kith and kin, they seem to have very little concern for any form of compassion for those less fortunate, and their economic policies seem to be about creating more wealth for the wealthy and not really giving a shit about the poor. 

And, worse, they don't even try to pretend they care any more. Every policy they create smacks of an arrogant flaunting of wealth; they trumpet the values of the unfettered free market, while scapegoating all those without their fortunate social status who don't have financial or class privilege.

But how do you combat them? 

There's no point in trying to cull them via some act of barbaric terrorism. For a start, that's not an acceptable answer and, logistically, there's just too many of them coming off the Eton production line. And certainly, judging by the result of the last election, the argument about who should run the country and what values we should uphold seems to have been lost. They remain the people most other people want in power at the moment.

It's a horrible feeling that they've probably won for quite a while now. And it's a massively depressing thought that most people either think like them or don't care enough about anything but themselves to seen any alternative.

Labour needs to get its act together. The alternative is too depressing to seriously think about...