The 'con' in Conservative

What will be the story of the 2009 Euro elections? Clearly, there will be a massive anti-Labour reaction, as this government's power and influence ebbs away, with no sense of public regret. But who will benefit politically?

Will it be the BNP? Entirely possible.

Will it be the Green Party? I hope so, if Morning Star readers have anything to do with it. Apart from the Green Party's push for huge numbers of jobs in the new green industries, the Greens are making a determined push to keep the BNP out /www.stopnickgriffin.org.uk.

Or will it be something altogether more mundane? Will the British people signal that they intend to return the Conservatives to power next year by handing the Tories a landslide victory next month?

Our Labour government is mired in sleaze. It has set up an economic catastrophe which is overlaid on a slower-burning environmental catastrophe. So it could seem absurd that voters might bring back a party which left office in 1997 mired in even more sleaze and having presided over various economic disasters overlaid on a slower-burning environmental catastrophe only concealed by the fortuitous temporary relief afforded by the "dash to gas."

But it is entirely possible, thanks to Britain's narrowly framed business-dominated neoliberal politics and our see-saw first-past-the-post electoral system.

Now is therefore a good moment to assess the Cameronian "revolution." I will attempt to do so from my point of view as a Green.

To begin with, does anyone seriously believe that, if David Cameron's Conservatives win a majority in the general election, they will bring about a change of direction in respect of Heathrow expansion, new coal-burning power stations such as Kingsnorth, new nuclear power stations, slow progress on renewables or emissions targets?

In the cases of Heathrow and Kingsnorth, I predict that the Tories will say that things have gone too far for them to be able to turn back - they will wring their hands and say that Labour has committed them to paths which they would in principle like not to go down. In the case of nuclear, the Tories have already signalled their desire to forge ahead with new stations.

The Tory Party is, according to Conservative MP Tim Yeo, "interested" in contraction and convergence - a globally just means of delivering emissions targets favoured by the Green Party. But I predict that the Tories in power would do precisely zilch to try to make it a reality.

In the case of renewables, a few symbolic mega-projects would doubtless be put in place, but would there be any change of the underlying status quo? It is Conservative councillors up and down the country who tend to stand most dogmatically in the way of allowing wind-energy projects going ahead.

A significant number of Tory MPs and MEPs are in fact climate-change deniers. Only UKIP is "ahead" of them in this regard.

And now this question - does anyone seriously believe that the financial crisis wouldn't have been just as bad if for the last decade we had been under the "leadership" of free-market-mad Tories such as Cameron and George Osborne?

The deregulation of the economy and of big finance has utterly failed. This is what has produced the financial and climate meltdowns. But deregulation is even more the touchstone of Cameron and Osborne than of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown.

Our economic stability and our very survival as a viable civilisation - wouldn't that be a good idea? - now depend upon serious and large-scale government intervention. This is no time for Britain to give its allegiance to a cheap PR man wedded to laissez-faire economics who saved his political skin a couple of years back only by promising a swingeing cut in inheritance tax for the very rich.

All Cameron is, I suggest, is a more right-wing and less plausible version of Blair. He is even more of a phoney than Blair. At least Blair somehow, madly, seemed to believe his own lies. You may say he was sincerely insincere. With Cameron, totemic episodes such as the chauffeur seen driving behind him as he cycled to work point up only that his "new Conservatives" underline the outright "con" in Conservatism.

This ought to be a time of political meltdown. The system that has governed our thinking for at least a generation is literally bankrupt. And we have probably one chance, one window, to assure our survival as a civilisation.

A proportional representation election such as that on June 4 offers the chance of course for a sudden radical change in voters' preferences.

If our democracy works, if the people rule at least to some degree, then they - we - will throw all the deregulatory rascals out and switch to a radical alternative.

Perhaps this will produce the puerile triumph of scapegoating and of a vicious fascism. Or perhaps it will yield the triumph of hope, of a last chance for humanity. Of, to begin with, an economic stabilisation package that, unlike Brown's, might actually work because, as we move toward the harnessing of free endlessly renewable energy, we will naturally generate massive savings over time to pay off the national debt. This is our Green New Deal proposal.

So what will the story of the 2009 Euro elections be? As voters give Labour the kicking it deserves, will they do so via the vehicle of the racist BNP? Via the positive vision and plan for getting us out of this mess of the Green Party?

Or will voters provide the mundane ending that Cameron's clever PR machine desires - a case on June 4 of the traditional knee-jerk response of British voters to a "Labour" government that they don't like - rather than the profound political paradigm shift that we as a people and as a species desperately need.

My argument is this. That we do not need to accept the looking-glass logic that hands the laurel to another neoliberal. What I have tried to do here is to set out just how plain mad, how utterly forgetful, it would be for Britain to rebound away from the total failure of new Labour to embrace Cameron's sub-Blair act.

But over to you, reader/writer/activist/voter, to make the decision.