On the eve of the 1997 general election, I was talking to a group of Pony Club mums in the village where I lived. All of them ‘followed the hunt’, even if they didn’t hunt themselves, and were proud supporters of country pursuits.
I asked them how they planned to vote the next day — and every last one of them said Labour.
‘But they’ll ban hunting,’ I said. ‘Tony Blair has promised a vote on foxhunting in his manifesto.’
‘No, Tony Blair would never do that!’ they insisted.
I knew then that they were deluded: starstruck by Blair’s manipulative charisma. He’d promised the nation that ‘Things can only get better’ — but found plenty of time to wage class warfare, too.
Nadine Dorries as a young nurse of just 18, in 1975. She writes, ‘God knows the NHS has its problems today’
Sure enough, New Labour finally banned fox hunting — after wasting 700 hours of Parliamentary time on it — in 2004.
Now, you may not agree with hunting — I don’t, as it happens — but that’s not the point. When natural Tory voters, fed up with their usual party’s performance in government, switch sides to hand Labour a massive majority, the move often proves completely self-defeating.
In 2024, of course, the problem is even worse than in 1997. Nigel Farage openly admits that Labour are set to win on Thursday and is urging people to vote for his Reform outfit as a ‘revolt’ against the Conservatives, whom, he says, have ‘destroyed themselves’.
In dozens of seats, a centre-Right vote split between the Tory Party and Reform UK risks ushering in a Labour MP, and handing Sir Keir Starmer a supermajority that could enable him to operate almost completely unchallenged.
Is that really what Conservative voters want?
Starmer has already given us a taste of how class war will return under his government, thanks to his promise to apply VAT to private school fees. Taxing the state pension and savings, as well as increases in council tax, are widely predicted to follow.
Farage implies that none of this matters, arguing that natural Tories should instead send a clear message to Westminster. What he’s saying, in effect, is this: ‘Given that Labour are going to win, why not vote for something you actually believe in?’
What he doesn’t mention is that any vote for Reform UK will benefit his party financially.
If Reform succeeds in getting at least two MPs elected to Parliament, or one MP and more than 150,000 votes, it will qualify for ‘short money’ — the taxpayer-funded annual sums paid to opposition parties in the Commons to help them with their costs.
This is not small change. Every seat that Reform wins entitles it to just over £19,400 annually, plus a further £38.75 for every 200 votes it secures at the election. Ker-ching!
That is an awful lot of money for an organisation like Reform, which operates without the membership base of the two main parties.
No wonder Farage wants people to vote Reform in seats where he knows he is barely polling and will never return an MP.
In almost every seat, then, a ‘protest’ vote for Reform will be counter-productive.
With just two days to go, let me impress on you what a Starmer supermajority would really look like — and how it would hurt you the most in your pocket.
Starmer is cynically harnessing that young, idealistic vote to ensure that his party remains in power — possibly for ever, writes Nadine
Starmer proudly served under his ‘friend’ Jeremy Corbyn, whom he said would have made a better Prime Minister than Boris Johnson. So he is no Blair. Rather, he is a new James Callaghan: a red in tooth and claw socialist who tilts heavily to the Left.
Some of us can remember what life was like under Callaghan and Harold Wilson in the 1970s.
I remember all too well Labour’s breathtaking incompetence and mismanagement of the economy back then, and how the party repeatedly caved in to the unions that many people feared truly ran the country. Under Wilson in 1975, inflation was running at over 25 per cent — and it was in double digits for half that decade.
In 1976, Chancellor Denis Healey was forced to request an urgent bailout from the International Monetary Fund as the UK teetered on the verge of bankruptcy and Britain became the sick man of Europe.
Then came the bitterly cold Winter of Discontent in 1978 and 1979. Lorry drivers went on strike, causing food shortages, and supermarkets rationed basic items such as tea and sugar, as people queued outside. Rubbish piled high in the streets, and bodies went unburied.
The misery was everywhere. I remember being a young nurse of just 18, in 1975, and seeing a woman almost bleed to death in her bed following a hysterectomy. The blood was soaking her sheets and pooling on the floor.
I rang the alarm buzzer and — remembering that in the case of fire or haemorrhage, I was allowed to run — legged it down the ward, calling for a doctor to be paged.
Senior nurses arrived and ordered me to rush to the linen cupboard to fetch fresh sheets for the poor woman — but the cupboard was bare.
So was the cupboard on the opposite ward. It took me ten minutes of ringing around wards just to find some spare sheets.
God knows the NHS has its problems today, but at least our hospitals have enough sheets. Yet this is what the Health Service was reduced to under Labour in the mid-1970s — like a scene from the developing world.
And you don’t even have to go back that far. Gordon Brown, a man much more closely aligned to the politics of Callaghan and Starmer than he was to Blair — hence the two men’s eventual hatred for each other — was far more Left-wing than his image as a ‘prudent’ Scotsman belied.
Brown introduced his infamous pension tax raid in his first budget, scrapping tax relief on dividends paid into pension funds — and leaving many who saved for years without the means to live comfortably in retirement.
We already know that Starmer, along with his firebrand deputy Angela Rayner, is in thrall to the unions, to ‘workers’ rights’ and against the strivers and savers.
He doesn’t have the grit of Blair to stand up to the unions, or the instinctive understanding of the ambitions of the middle class.
Remember, too, that he wants to make it easier for a male to ‘identify’ as a woman — and he even thinks that some women have penises.
Already, in anticipation of a Left-wing Starmer government, money is flowing out of the country. History shows that investors and entrepreneurs will soon follow — and that is when the UK economy risks going into serious decline.
And that’s why I disagree so strongly with Farage. It’s OK for him, a privately educated multi-millionaire, to ask you to hand vast power to a Left-wing Labour government, but he’s also asking you to pay for it, too.
Because it’s Mail readers — the squeezed middle — who will surrender more of their income to fund Starmer’s promises and keep his union paymasters happy.
And if anyone thinks that five years under Labour might be a price worth paying to force the Conservatives to regroup and get their act together for the next general election in 2029, Starmer is one step ahead.
After all, he’s going to reduce the voting age to 16.
Everyone knows the old saying: ‘If you’re not Labour when you’re 18, you have no heart. If you’re not Conservative by the time you’re 30, you have no brain.’
Starmer is cynically harnessing that young, idealistic vote to ensure that his party remains in power — possibly for ever.
All this is what Nigel Farage is asking you to usher in by voting for Reform UK. He’s playing you for a fool.
If you are like the Pony Club mums I spoke to back in 1997, and you’re thinking to yourself that none of this will ever happen, then this is your last chance to think again.