I'm voting for Gordon Brown - and here's why

In the days following the anticipated announcement of a UK general election, I was at the Christian gathering Spring Harvest, and missed the news of the Labour Party manifesto. But on the way home, on the car radio we listened to the main points of the Conservative Party manifesto.

The BBC picked out what presumably were its main points, which included:

Vote for us and we will bring more power to the people by enabling UK citizens to...
...start their own schools
...veto rises in local Council Tax
...share responsibility for the work of the police

They also promised to reverse Labour's planned National Insurance hike, and to set an annual limit on the number of non-EU economic migrants.

There are a number of items like scrapping ID cards, reducing police paperwork, and giving Parliament the chance to vote again on whether our Hooray Henries can once more gallop around the countryside with their dogs tearing foxes to pieces - 'the unspeakable in pursuit of the uneatable', as Oscar Wilde once most accurately described it.

Where should one begin?

So many Conservative voters were privately educated that I should have thought it had not escaped their notice that citizens already have the power to start their own schools. Among my friends are those who home educate and those who have joined forces with friends to start community schools. What kind of a manifesto makes a fanfare of promising to give people the freedom to do as they have been already empowered to do by the 1944 Education Act?

Veto-ing rises in Council Tax? A similarly splendid idea. Our Council Tax pays for our local services like hospitals and doctors' surgeries, maintenance of roads, the Environment Agency, police and fire services. Imagine if last spring the Council had proposed an increase in Council Tax, and some citizens had chosen to veto that increase, thus preventing it occurring. Then we had gone through the weather we saw last winter, with prolonged snow and severe frost, leaving the roads covered with potholes and the surface compromised. Oh dear! We'd have vetoed the increase that would have paid for the work that we needed to do to fix it.

And giving power to the people to share the work of the police force? What? Vigilante groups? No thanks! Or do they simply mean cutting back the police force and making citizens do it themselves instead, as volunteers?

Scrapping Labour's planned National Insurance hike would save every one of us a few pence. Whoopee.

Setting a limit on non-EU economic migrants sounds like 'sending desperate people back home to be tortured' by another name to me.

And 'reducing police paperwork'; now there's a crisp, incisive, focussed, visionary objective!

Gordon Brown has become a face the media love to hate in recent months. The pack has howled and sneered and done what it can to bring him down. As the likelihood of an election drew near, deeply disillusiuoned by the shenanegans of MPs and bankers alike, I listened very carefully to the political views of both public figures and personal acquaintances.

The thing is, I am in many ways a natural Conservative. I don't want to be interfered with. I don't want to be paid for. I want to pay my own way and support my own family. I believe in family not government covering the shortfall of the needy. I like to make my own choices about education, health, and the countryside. I believe in the buck stopping with me. And whatever life throws at me (and it's bowled me quite a few googlies) somehow I survive.

But when I cast my vote as a UK citizen, I vote not for my personal interest but for the interest of the UK community, within a Europen and world context. I vote for the meta-narrative, the big picture I seek to put in place - not for a precentage decrease in the dosh I can get my hands on when my parents peg out.

I vote for a society that will care for the vulnerable, the incompetent, the frail and the unintelligent - because the gifted and able and diligent and thrifty and prudent will always look after themselves.

When I began looking into the political views of others, I discovered some interesting facts about Gordon Brown's government I never had learned from our media.

Hastings (where I live) is a poor town. One of the Gordon Brown initiatives, Sure-Start, has made an amazing difference to poor mothers. It's not just about childcare places so mothers can return to work. For example, each week a free healthy lunch is offered to pregnant women, and health care professionals, including a midwide, are on hand to answer questions. A greengrocer who will deliver to homes attends offering vegetables at a specially affordable price.

I believe the charities Book-Start and Home-Start are linked to the same endeavour.

In a recent article in The Times newspaper, JK Rowling has spoken about the support offered by a Labour government to young families struggling in poverty, and about the contrast this presents with the Conservative approach. Not only is the article very informative and revealing, so are the many comments by Conservative voters that follow it. Read it, and you will see what I mean!

Outside the UK, Gordon Brown has been greatly respected for his achievements. Here he has been vilified at every turn. The economic crisis was blamed on him: and yes, he took the decision to take this country deeply into debt. But faced with a choice of borrow or sink, I guess he didn't have too many options.

Something I love about Gordon Brown is that I believe him to be a man of passion, integrity and vision. He is a serious man, as the Amish say - and I value that.

But for me, in deciding which way to cast my vote at the General Election, there is one clinching factor, and it is this:
The leader of the Conservative Party, David Cameron; the shadow chancellor, George Osborne; and the mayor of London, Boris Johnson, all were members of the Bullingdon Club. Please do take the time to follow that link and read carefully all it has to say.

In the 1980s, the biographer of Boris Johnson, Andrew Gimson, described the Bullingdon Club in these terms: "I don't think an evening would have ended without a restaurant being trashed and being paid for in full, very often in cash."

The Chancellor? The Prime Minister? That sort of man? No, thank you.

My mother is a true-blue Conservative, and has never voted anything else. I am the Red under her bed! I pointed out to her this link with the Bullingdon Club, and she laughed it off, saying those men had grown out of those youthful high jinks now. But when they were young bloods at university smashing every window in the restaurant after sinking a skinful of booze, who footed the bill? Them? Of course not! Their parents. So their behaviour was condoned and encouraged by the elders and authority figires who brought them up. My mother is fond of saying that as we grow older we become more and more like our parents - we return to our roots. So presumably Cameron, Osborne et al will mature into the men who think money is for getting drunk and trashing restaurants. And they are hoping we will buy the notion of their manifesto of a more responsible society?

I ask you - whatever you think of Gordon Brown; can you imagine him behaving like that?