No choice now - civil libertarians must vote Tory

Evelyn Waugh wisely commented that it was impossible to vote for any of the factions vying for popular support - you could only vote against the one you despised the most. I genuinely could not decide which of the two main offerings was the more contemptible until today.

Oddly, the scales have been tipped for me not by anything Cameron & Co. have said, but by Home Secretary Alan Johnson, the most likely future leader of the Labour Party and perhaps the least personally repulsive member of the current regime.

As reported by the Telegraph, when launching a new ad campaign that shows a burglar praising Tory policies, Johnson:

. . . claimed the Tory leader was more interested in civil liberties than catching and punishing offenders. He criticised Conservative positions on the DNA database and CCTV cameras and joked that prisoners would be more likely to back the Conservatives if they had the vote.

Would that the first part were true: Cameron's focus groups have shown no great concern for civil liberties among the narrow sector of the electorate he believes will swing the next election, and any emphasis on civil liberties risks empowering David Davies, the man he beat out for the leadership with a great deal of help from his predecessor, Michael 'Dracula' Howard.

However, the new Labour ad and Johnson's statement makes it clear that the present regime regards civil liberties as an obstacle to what they conceive as justice. If the electorate is too stupid to understand the implications of that, then Britons ever ever ever more shall be slaves.