No.94 - The Battle of the Buses Begins!

Dear James,

All tickets please! Your bus is about to leave for the future. Red buses, blue buses, orange and green buses, they will all soon be leaving their garages to display their splendid new liveries, spotless and gleaming for the nation to admire.  No doubt your bus, James, will have great big words emblazoned on its side saying ‘Let’s Get Brexit Done!’. While Mr Corbyn’s bus will shout out. ‘For the Many not the Few’. And the Lib-Dems – if they can afford a bus – will be saying something about a brighter future? 

And so the simplification and dumbing down of our politics will begin. For a very brief period, the politicians will be trying to hook our single votes on the basis of these slogans. Of course, my single vote is useless. I live in Deep Blue territory and so we will see no buses in our area. Instead, the buses will cruise the motorways northwards to those key marginals that might or might not deliver Boris’s parliamentary dream - or nightmare?   

Of course, the real world has nothing to do with buses. The buses are temporary, just like the many slogans that appear on their sides, mere fronts to the hidden engineering of each vehicle. It is these elements that the two main parties try to hide from us but which will be the real story of the future. When the buses and their political graffiti are back in their garages, forgotten again for four years, it is these underlying designs which will emerge to haunt us all. Caveat Emptor! Make sure you know what you are buying before you buy? 

So, let’s do it. Let’s caveat before we emptor. If we lift the bonnets of these gleaming monsters what do we find?  Mr Corbyn’s engineering department seems to be attempting to reverse-engineer a semi-autonomous driving system that will take us back to a 1970’s vision of a socialist nirvana. It believes in the renationalisation of key industries, the reintroduction of Clause 4 – the clause that calls for the eventual ownership of the means of production by the people. It wants to take 10% of the equity of large companies to give to its workers to allow them a say in its management. It claims that it is dedicated to helping ‘the working people’. Nothing wrong with the aim. The only question is how they do it. Labour believes in large government intervening from the top to impose fundamental change on the structures and systems of our country. But in the end, companies will end up being run in the interests of its workers rather than its customers. Labour’s slogan should be, ‘For the Unionized Few by the Unionized Few’. It does not look good for those springs of entrepreneurial initiative that have been at the base of our prosperity over the last forty years. 

But what about you, the Tories, James? Something has happened to your party.  Your engineering division seems also to have a semi-autonomous driving system in mind but this time with a vision taking us towards abandoning your current engine and replacing it with one based upon an unspecified new design and supplies of spare parts from across the Atlantic. What happens in this dramatic changeover, no one seems to know. But hey ho, your chief engineer is a cheery chappy with absolute faith in his own powers even though he wouldn’t recognize an engineering school if it hit him on the head with a spanner.  In reality though he has created an ‘English Nationalist’ party that threatens to destroy the Union and expose our small island nation to the risks of the giant beasts of international trade – the trading blocks of China, the USA and the EU. No wonder so many of your One Nation Tories have abandoned you James.

There is, of course, that third bus - the orange one? Their engine has been underpowered since a big breakdown some years ago but has since been redesigned upon a well engineered and proven system called common sense. This machine does not rely on the semi-autonomous programmes of the Corbyn or Johnson ‘unicorns’ but has its priorities - climate change, the NHS, education and, of course, staying in the EU. What a relief it would be to be ruled again by pragmatic common sense!

James, if we are to remain a decent country, a united country, a rich country, a fair country, a tolerant country we must not allow ourselves to be blinded by slogans on the sides of buses. As the ignition keys are turned, we must remember the fundamentally different engineering of each bus. The choices have never been clearer!

So hang on tight James. The buses are about to leave the station. I hope you enjoy your ride!  

Kind regards,

BH - Your Concerned Constituent