Labor Loses Big in UK Elections
Link
Best of all London mayor “Red Ken” Livingstone received a sound thrashing, losing to conservative candidate Boris Johnson.
Labour officials were amazingly clueless about the burden these green taxes placed on ordinary Britons and merrily proposed more.“If someone drops litter, they should be arrested,” Livingstone threatened during his campaign, thinking his resolve would impress rather than infuriate voters with its ecologically correct pettiness in a city otherwise awash in real crime.
Every tax and intrusion imposed by Labour in recent years was justified as being for voters’ “own good.” Ending global warming, reducing carbon footprints, lowering carbon emissions and raising public funding of renewable energy — all were excuses used to hit the voters’ pocketbook with more taxes.
Yet none of these taxes improved the quality of life. Instead, just a few of them — the same ones the green lobby wants here — showed British voters this was a puritanical scheme to reduce the quality of life and substitute a Roundhead feeling of virtue as its own reward.
“In other words, don’t even think about enjoying yourself,” wrote Malcolm Davis on Reuters’ site.
But in the meantime, crime rose, state services declined, the bureaucrats proliferated, the National Health Service deteriorated and British purchasing power evaporated. “Many feel the government is creating a green fear for monetary gain,” Mark Hodson of Opinium Research told the Independent newspaper.
Worse yet, government’s only strength seemed to be in harassing its own citizens. Britain, for instance, had been covered with security cameras — which no doubt would be used by Livingstone to nab litterbugs — but have done little to prevent terrorism. It’s telling that last year a car full of bombs was detected not by anti-terror cameras, but by over-active tow trucks looking for illegally parked cars.
I’m just waiting for pundits to blame the loss on conservative US president George Bush.
Leave a comment