unpalatable views: ideology is no excuse

As a Conservative-voting blue-collar worker, I find it disturbing to speak to people with views I wouldn’t countenance because they are too "right-wing". The reason I am disturbed is because of the frequency with which the holders of these views are Labour voters, usually union members, sometimes even Labour party members.

To give three examples, I often hear them rant about the world’s population ("we need compulsory population control"), single mothers ("put them in homes where they won’t be a burden on the state") and race ("send all the Muslims back to where they came from"). These are real examples I’ve come across while speaking to left-wingers.

I can’t quote irresponsible views like the above without answering them. Population control brought Indira Ghandi’s first government down spectacularly in the fever of the Emergency; many single mothers choose to work instead of relying on benefits, despite the fact that after 13 years of concentrating on taxing the rich, a single Mum with two kids choosing to return to work from benefits faces the equivalent of a 90% tax rate; and a lot of Muslims come from here in the first place – this is where they belong, and they are anxious to maintain the freedoms that all of us wish to continue to enjoy.

But professing left-wingedness seems to be a get out of jail free card concerning unpalatable views. These are people who say they wouldn’t touch, say, the English Defence League with a bargepole: and a good thing too, as their views are too extreme to be representative of the EDL.

During the Blairite reformation of the Labour Party, message and reality parted company and remain dislocated. We already have to deal with Labour's unelected placemen on councils throughout the country – we let them back into Government at our peril.

OrdinaryG
300 words