Roy Greenslade (Guardian Utd): No vote for a criminal

[Jack Rabbit]

From the Guardian Unlimited (UK)
Dated Wednesday May 4

No vote for a criminal
By Roy Greenslade

Everywhere around me people are announcing that they are about to vote Labour with the greatest reluctance. Forget the war, they say, that's all behind us now. So the Guardian's Polly Toynbee urges us to wear nose pegs as we vote for Blair while Tony Parsons, the Daily Mirror columnist, says he will vote Labour with a sigh. Meanwhile the Sun, perversely, wants us to vote Labour because of the war.

Well, I'll have none of it. I am not prepared to vote for the party that maintains as its leader a man who took us to war on what, to be kind, was the flimsiest of intelligence and the most equivocal of legal advice. But even if I had not read the Hutton report or the views of the attorney general, I would still have refused to put my cross against a Labour name.

I opposed the war once it became clear that Blair and Bush were prepared to invade Iraq in spite of the expert advice of Hans Blix, against the wishes of the UN and in defiance of almost the entire world. In effect, Blair secretly colluded with a foreign power to carry out a war of aggression. That was a crime, and I cannot bring myself to vote for a criminal.

OK, say many of my friends as they fish nose pegs from their bottom drawers, we know about your principled opposition to the war. But we have principles too. We cannot countenance abandoning the social democratic project on behalf of the British people - with its Sure Start initiative, investment in education and reform of the health service - to the barbarian Tory hordes. According to Polly and the Peggers, to turn one's back on these policies reeks of middle-class decadence because we can afford the return of a Conservative government while the poor cannot.

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