I’ve just been looking at the latest debate – what fun. Sort of. I no longer have a vote in the UK election, which is fair enough as I don’t live there. But then, I suppose one of the reasons I don’t live there is that I don’t think the place is well managed, so it’s not as if I’m not interested.
Verdict? Well, if you vote Labour, you know exactly what you are going to get, as you’ve had 13 years to find out what that is. So if you think the current situation is hunky dory, then you’d immediately vote for them. If you don’t, then you’d have to choose between the other two, Tories and LibDems. If you’ve got any kind of memory and are old enough to vote, you should really remember what the Tories are all about. The way the UK generally works, is that one party fucks up the country and then the other of the two main parties gets voted in and fucks it up in a different way. That’s pretty much how it’s been for the last 50 years or so – as long as I can remember. Assuming that the Tories get voted in again, why would it be any different?
Which leaves the LibDems. If you vote for
them, you might get the fun of seeing an entirely different party mess up the
country, which would definitely be more interesting. On the face of things,
they are unlikely to do a worse job than anyone has done for as long as you can
remember. Of course, it is a truism to say that you shouldn’t trust a
politician. But it’s a bit like buying a second-hand car. You shouldn’t trust a
second-hand car salesman either, but if you are going to buy a car, you pretty
much have to choose the least blatantly untrustworthy. The only thing we know
is that the country is going to be run by a politician, so you will have to
suspend your distrust long enough to vote.
From what I could see, Gordon Brown was utterly unconvincing as a person – shaking his head at anything Cameron said, forcing a weird smile from time to time and utterly devoid of any charisma. Do we really want him representing us for another 5 years? Hmmm. And lest we forget, no one asked him to represent us in the first place.
David Cameron seemed to have a sweaty chin – in as much as he has a chin at all. There is something embarrassingly fake about him, like he wants the population to consider him as a real common-or-garden person, when he comes across as a plastic, made-in-China politician. He’s probably a top bloke – but he doesn’t look like one, failed to answer questions, ducked and dived and produced the same points scoring rhetoric that he must have learnt at the Oxford Union. I wouldn’t vote for him on that showing.
Which leaves Nick Clegg. Clegg actually looks like a real person, who doesn’t do the normal politician thing of pretending that everything is simple. I thought he was excellent on the amnesty for illegal immigrants. Of course it is sensible to recognise those who have been in the country for 10 years, not out of any philosophical conviction, but simply because they are not going to go away, so you might as well accept the situation. The other two parties would like you to believe that they have a giant carpet sweeper to brush them up with – or more likely, they’d just ignore the problem and hope it goes away. I thought that Clegg was the most realistic and by far the most likeable, so the LibDems would get my vote – as the lesser of evils. He is much more relaxed than the other two and has a common touch that they lack.
The one thing the LibDems continue to fail to do, however, is to believe that they can be elected as the government. Talking about hung Parliaments and power-sharing is like entering Wimbledon and telling everyone what you are going to do with the prize money for fourth place. It doesn’t actually demonstrate any belief, does it? The fact of the matter is, that anyone can win the election, as so far, no one has cast any votes, so all parties are in with an equal chance.
After all, if the USA can elect a black president, you’re not trying to tell me that it is beyond the bounds of possibility for the UK to finally elect a LibDem government – if only out of the sheer tedium of having yet another Tory or Labour one. Against all the odds, this election is now beginning to look very interesting. In the last elections, half the electorate hasn’t even bothered to vote, so the LibDems would only have to convince a few of those abstainers to trot down to the polling station, and Nick could be in No. 10. Exciting! At least for a few weeks.
