Gay Marriage Blues

So what have we learned from last week's local election results?  Apart from the fact that the Tories and their lickspittles are deeply unpopular, that is.  Well, according to all the usual Tory backbench rent-a-quotes, who apparently had nothing better to do over a bank holiday weekend than sit in radio and TV studios pontificating, their electoral setbacks were all down to gay marriage.  This was the theme they kept returning to - not an interview went by without reference to the the 'fact' that people hadn't voted Tory because their Lib Dem coalition partners had forced them to support gay marriage.  Which left me confused.  Were they really suggesting that when going to the polling booth to cast their votes, undecided voters said to themselves, 'Well, I'm not supporting legalised bumming - I blame those Tory bastards for the increase in buggery in the UK, you can't walk down the street without running the risk of being the victim of a drive-by sodomy - so I'm going to vote Labour'.  But apparently they were.  Sort of.  Their argument seemed to be that the Lib Dems have had too much influence, resulting in government policies being too liberal, which alienated many voters, who wanted them to be more right-wing.

Quite how a supposed unfulfilled yearning for right-wing policies amongst the electorate translates into an increased Labour vote still isn't clear.  Moreover, the only evidence for the pernicious influence of the Lib Dems is the afore-mentioned gay marriages and the proposed reform of the House of Lords.  Both of which, confusingly, were described by one of the rent-a-quotes as policies which the electorate didn't care about.  In which case, why would their voting intentions be affected by them?  It's troubling that the response of Tory backbenchers to rejection at the polls should be to retreat into some reactionary fantasy-land where there's some silent majority craving extremist policies.  After all, they are part of one of the most reactionary governments we've ever seen, using financial recession as an excuse for the effective destruction of the welfare state and curtailment of civil liberties.  Clearly, the idea that the electorate might be beginning to see through them, and recognise that they are simply the agents of corporate capitalism, hell-bent on squeezing every ounce of profit from us before moving on to suck some other state dry, is so troubling to them that they've gone into total denial.  Still, come the revolution we'll stick them all up against the wall and shoot them.  Either that, or force them into gay marriages.