In case you need persuading…

There are local elections on tomorrow, up and down the country. If you can, you should vote. (I'm looking at you, students).

More particularly, you should vote against the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats. Your vote is under threat: taking a leaf from the racist, elitist American Republican playbook, the Conservatives are trying to make it harder for the poor and the mobile to vote. Why? Because they tend to vote Labour.

I'm a semi-detached member of the Labour Party: I'm in it because I believe that socialists need a mass party which has some prospect of taking power, rather than myriad ideologically-pure sects who'll never do anything other than produce nice webpages about the coming revolution. I'm a Labour member because I detect glimmers of leftwing spirit, and because most of the Labour right wing is still dedicated to the people as they understand it (now that Blair and most of his friends are discredited). I'm Labour because my local representatives are a fine and upstanding bunch of people.

If you need any incentive to vote tomorrow, here are a few pointers:

The coalition cut taxes on people earning £150,000, while cutting benefits for disabled children.

The budget attacked the old, the poor and the sick, while doing nothing to fix the economy.

Your local Tories voted for £9000 tuition fees.

The major attacks on public services are going to come through council provision, whether its social services, street cleaning or policing. The Tories know this: they've capped council taxes so that when the cuts come, Labour councils up and down the country will be blamed for them: no angry voter is going to listen to them when they explain that their government funding has been diverted to nuclear weapons and tax cuts for millionaires. At least if we have Labour or leftwing councils (Plaid Cymru are looking excellent too), they'll try to defend the poorest and weakest - whereas Conservative areas will hit those people first.

Let's make tomorrow a truly miserable day for Cameron and Clegg. We won't get to vote them out for another three years, but we can scour our councils clean of these cynical, selfish bastards. If you're too disillusioned and depressed to vote, your abstention will be proclaimed by the Tories as an endorsement of their vicious class warfare.