As I type this, my fellow Brits are going to the polls. But I won’t be, partly because I agree with Perry de Havilland that it only encourages them, but mostly because I’ve been out of the country since March and far too lazy to arrange postal or proxy votes.
I might have voted for UKIP as a kind of protest against the inexorable European integration but there’s plenty about UKIP that I dislike, such as their immigration policy, so it would have been a half-hearted vote at best.
What strikes me is how tedious the whole charade is. The main difference between politicians is how they will share out the spoils, so until there is debate about the size of the state, political parties will seem the same to me. (That’s really the appeal of UKIP: protesting against Brussels is protesting against the growth of the state.) And everyone knows that Labour will win again anyway.
I think most people realise this, most people are disillusioned and see the vote as a Hobson’s choice, not agreeing whole-heartedly with any one party line. I’ll make a prediction: we’ll see the lowest voter turn-out ever this time around. Politicians will bleat that it’s a disaster for democracy and that Something Must Be Done. But a low turn-out will at least show them that they’re not as important as they like to think they are. A lot of us just wish they’d go away.
The election was pretty pointless anyway as 70% of our laws come from Europe.
godmother,epithet dictionary Curran perusal.raining