The Future is Past.

'Allo Dave, got a new motor?'

(Picture driven at speed from here, and pretty much everywhere else.)

Labour think we'll all be scared of 'going back to the eighties'. My personal eighties weren't very good at all - it was in that decade that I hit Finance Zero for a period and I don't want to go back there. Looking at the bigger picture though, comparing the eighties to now, is something everyone who was alive then will be doing. Thanks for stirring those memories, Labour. That poster is effective but not in the way you wanted.

In the eighties, pensioners were disrespected by youth in the same way they are now, but when matters came to a head, the police would arrest the youth, not the pensioner. Pensioners could trust the police in the eighties. Now they are an easy source of target-filling.

In the eighties, nobody was arrested, fined, tagged and curfewed for selling a goldfish to anyone.

In the eighties, you could sit in the park on a sunny day with one bottle of beer and nobody minded. Heck, you could sit there and drink until your eyes melted and as long as you did it without bothering anyone else, nobody minded.

In the eighties, you could sit in a pub and smoke and nobody minded. Nobody died from it either. You could also sit in the beer garden of pubs that had them, have a beer and a smoke and nobody quivered in terror if a little bit of smoke drifted their way once in a while. Back then it was not actually illegal to smoke in a laboratory but it was rarely tolerated, because it just wasn't a sensible thing to do. It didn't need to be illegal.

Common rooms allowed smoking. I could take some work into the common room, draw graphs and smoke at the same time and there was never any question of 'smokers doing less work'. Now, we have to go outside to smoke and we're told that makes us slackers. Now we are looking forward to the time when we have to change our clothes to go outside and change out of our smoking clothes to come back in. No doubt we will face further 'you are costing us money' accusations as a result.

In the eighties, nobody was fined for having a baked bean tin in the paper bin nor for putting out their bin ten seconds too early, half an inch too far from the kerb or with the lid not quite hermetically sealed.

In the eighties, parents were not fined when their children threw bread to ducks.

In the eighties, CCTV was uncommon, and it didn't shout at you.

There is so much more to compare. Letters from a Tory has collected a handy reference list.

So if the Cameroid was really intending to take us back to the eighties, I have a feeling that the overall mood of the country would be 'Great!' Unfortunately, both for Labour's petty character-assassination campaigning and for the rest of us, the Cameroid promises nothing of the kind.

The Cameroid promises to reduce the size of government by adding to it, he promises further meddling in our everyday lives, more nannying, more rules and regulations, more prodnoses on the streets, tighter controls on all of us and most of all, he promises to listen to us no more effectively than the current goblin horde.

He is not going to take us back to the Eighties in any form. Not one.

If he did, my resolve not to vote for his party would waver. As would many others, I suspect. As Prodicus points out, the eighties were so bad that when they ended, it took another seven years for Labour to get elected and they only managed that by pretending not to be socialists.

So, a return to the eighties, selectively editing out the bad parts now that we know what they were, could be a very good thing indeed. For the Tories and for us.

How about it, Dave? Worth sparing a thought for, just for a moment? You can dispose of all those Labour petty laws and targets at a stroke, repeal all the silly bans - including the ones you pretend we like - and get rid of the target culture that has destroyed the police, the schools, the NHS and more.

As it is, Dave, you're starting to look more and more like a newer version of the same thing. You are a straight replacement, where you should be an upgrade. That's why you're not getting the votes that Labour are shedding faster than water from a cholera victim. People aren't going to drop Red Labour only to vote Blue Labour. We are looking for big changes and you are not promising them.

Ask the pensioners, smokers, drinkers, drivers and everyone else that Labour have criminalised.

Ask them if they think you're promising anything different.