Well, we are in Brive, near the Dordogne and have had a revolting series of days for weather. This will be documented in an imminent blog, but we want to get down on record now what we want from tomorrow's General Election in UK.
We are entitled to votes because we have been on the Electoral Roll there within the last 5 years, so Chloe had our proxy and has (albeit inefficiently) voted according to our wishes.
These are aimed at securing what we think is the only helpful outcome - a Hung Parliament!
It goes (we hope in terms of our beloved followers) without saying that a Tory majority would be a disaster. Despite all the image manipulation they remain a very "nasty" party on all social issues, would savagely cut public service without care for those dependent on them, and have taxation plans for the richest that make you sick!
But we also want a result that makes New Labour squirm with shame. A couple of months ago Ruth read an article in the International edition of the Guardian by her former comrade Peter Hain and was so incensed she wrote a reply. It was too late (or weak?) to be published, but she also sent it to him at the House of Commons and got an unapologetic but polite reply. This is what she then said:
Hain’s pitch for liberals has too many holes!
It’s a clever move by Millbank to wheel out Peter Hain for an attempt to draw back the disgusted baby-boomers who – under an unfair voting system – will have to decide whether they can put a clothes-peg o n their nose and vote Labour. It is clever because we feel great nostalgia for the era of courageous, creative, moral outrage which Peter symbolised in the Young Liberals and anti-Apartheid campaigns in the early Seventies. Along with others I followed him over to the Labour Party, but along with many others had to leave some post-Smith years later when the reality of Blair-Campbell-Mandelson and - perhaps most offensive of all then to liberals - the various guises of Blunkett – became apparent.
Somehow Peter Hain lived with himself– and flourished – through all of that! Then came Iraq!! The apology he will have to utter to persuade hundreds of thousands to comfortably wish for an unfettered Labour majority is surely too great!
He tells us that Labour is committed to constitutional reform, but the record is of broken pledges on the electoral system, puny tinkering with the Lords and use of peerages to stuff the government with unelected cronies.
We have to campaign strategically for a “well-hung parliament”- free of the cringing sycophants who let Blair go his own strange, sanctimonious and disastrous way. The price of co-operation should be a respectable phase of “truth and reconciliation” - followed by the head of Brown, whose timidity and lack of repentance for the Blair years is also so offensive to the former friends of Peter Hain.
Now he has even gone back on the need for proportional representation - so no hope there!
Since then we have been cataloguing the sins of Brown and would add his two years of soft-pedalling with the banking community which allowed it to go its own way on credit policy. What he may have done as a rescue bid does not excuse his inactivity in the "prawn cocktail" Blair years. OK, he did attempt some progressive taxation, and some other poverty-alleviating projects, and he himself is a social liberal, but what about nonsense like ID cards, growth in prison population, and the Straw-supported loss of civil liberties in Bush's "war on terror". He and they will have to answer for this!
So we will be listening on the internet in our cheap (fridge-less) French hotel tomorrow with an unchilled bottle of cheap Champers at the ready, hoping that history is made. We are angry, we want change and we will be back!