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There is a whispering among the blogs. “Anyone But Labour”, it says. Anyone But Labour. Hmmm.

Now, I agree absolutely that the fight right now is for liberty. Hell, a large part of the reason that I’m working where I’m working is because of just that. But amidst the more sensible talk of cross-party coalitions on key, unifying issues, there’s something about the “kick the lot of them out of office at all costs!” attitude that makes me want to repeatedly smash my head onto the table. It smacks of the old self-defeating progressive tactic; identify a problem, fixate on one aspect of it as being the only one of importance, then find a solution that doesn’t actually solve the problem you were first worried about.

Let’s take a little walk down memory lane, to May 1997.

Now, I was but a nipper at the time, so forgive me if I have this awry. But I’m sure I remember that, for all our scepticism over New Labour, we were happy. We were happy because finally human rights were going to become central to British law. We were happy because there was going to be an elected second chamber. We were happy because there was going to be an ethical foreign policy. We were happy because there was a slight chance of electoral reform, maybe a shot at a written constitution. Hell, there was even the faintest chance that the causes of crime would be got tough upon. That’s what I remember.

What reservations we had about Blair were all about the Thatcherite economic leanings, about Frank Field’s punitive view of getting people off welfare, Harriet Harman’s middle-class social blinkers. Not because we thought they might turn Britain into a police state. Yes, we knew that the left has always had a strong illiberal element, but it was one that was diametrically opposed to the happy-clappy, sun-dried Islingtonian fluffery of the Blairite stereotype. Liberty was front and centre in the New Labour, um, “project”.

Now, I think we all agree that that one pretty much went to tits. Governments tend to do that – something about power corrupting. So why in the name of John Stuart Mill do we think that two-and-a-half months of cuddliness, from a leader who less than a year ago was one of the main writers of a manifesto promising ‘more police, lower taxes, school discipline and controlled immigration’, is a guarantee of the preservation of liberty that’ll last almost two parliaments?

Because if we’re talking about forcing Labour out, that means we’re okay with the Tories winning. And anybody who think that that’s a blow struck for freedom has fixated so hard on one aspect of the problem that they’ll persuade themselves to find victory in anything. It won’t be a victory. It’ll be a nil-nil defeat.

So yes: the fight right now is for liberty. But it’s astoundingly, incredibly, mind-frottingly shortsighted to think that it’s the only fight, or that it’ll still be the big fight in two years, fours years time. The battle’s already warming up over the scope of public service provision, withh all three parties tentatively sounding out their positions – do you really think the Tories are the best hope for preserving the collective welfare state? I’m with Chris and Ben on this one.

If this movement manages to get off the ground, it can be a cross-party fight for liberty, or it can be cross-all-but-one-parties fight to kick Labour out of office. It could even be a cross-some-bits-of-all-parties fight to kick New Labour out of Labour. But it can’t be all of them. Because there are other battles.

In case anybody was wondering where I’d got to – this happened at the beginning of the week:

Bastard bastard bastard bastard. I have to say, it’s got me thinking a lot about death, bereavement and the inevitability of mortality. You know, I keep asking myself the question: what will happen to that intangible but essential being that I know of as me, once I die?

It’s also got me thinking about where the hell I put my Win XP backup CD.

And interestingly, the answer to both questions is “It’ll be somewhere in a box, completely forgotten about and buried under piles of crap.”

Update:
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A quick post just to say that I’ve made an astonishing discovery: according to Google, nobody anywhere on the internet has yet described George W. Bush as America’s “first Gonzo President”. The reason I can be sure of this is that, according to Google, nobody has ever used the phrase “first Gonzo President” at all. Not to describe Kennedy, high on uppers while playing nuclear peekaboo with the Russians. Not Nixon, emerging from a fog of horse tranquilisers to find that he’s somehow travelled to China. And not Dubya, clearing the world of terror with the same wild abandon as he “clears brush on his ranch”.

How is this possible?

Well, if it falls to me to rectify it, then rectify it I shall: in all seriousness, George W. Bush is the very first Gonzo President of the United States of America. There, I said it. As to why I said it – I think that’s for a longer and undoubtedly more complex post, about my sudden, Damascene realisation that Bush is actually a crazy, insane, beautiful goddamn genius. The man is almost certainly right about everything, but wearied and petty drudges like us are just too small to see it.