You may have noticed that the political parties (although
they are all behaving more like children’s parties; expect jelly and balloons) have
launched their manifestos and lo and behold, bribes. Back us and we will spend
your children’s future taxes. No, back us and we will mortgage your
grandchildren. Ah, but WE will spend so much it will make historians wince.
It’s not ‘spending’, as such, it’s ‘investing’. What’s the use of money when
there is no planet left to buy? And so on and so forth; it’s going to go for a
few weeks.
Education, education and policing and justice and social
justice and rights and righting wrongs; it’s the economy, stupid. Oh and
Brexit; we will deal with it once and for all. Promise. Trust us; we will deliver.
It always amuses me how every party promises to deliver on promises they made
before and failed to make good on, often multiple times. The Tories have failed
to control immigration, establish order and build a mighty economy. Labour has similarly
failed – every time it has tried – to conjure up a land of milk and honey.
I forget quite what the LimpDems stand for, other than
not what the country voted for. The Greens just seem to hate humanity in its entirety
and if they are brutally honest they would probably start with a cull. (And if I’m
honest I think they are onto something there) But in reality, if they can’t
slaughter half the population they can at least promise to make all of us
thoroughly miserable. Despite all of them we still have just six days to save
the NHS, a situation which seems to have endured throughout my sentient life.
Northern Powerhouse, HS2, Bobbies on the beat, a free owl
for every child… the cacophony of false hope echoes around the land and
probably less than 5% of the electorate even hear it, let alone give a toss.
The net result of the steady post-war decline in standards, expectations and
trust in power is that nobody with the gift of independent thought believes a single
word of what any politician says. They may as well set up stalls and tout for
business selling miracle cures. Snake oil salesmen, the lot of them and some of
them don’t even realise it, so much like brainwashed automatons have party apparatchiks
become.
We need to face up to a simple, inescapable truth, which
is that politics as we knew it is a busted flush. The people we vote for are
powerless to effect change against the whims of the party machine and if the
party abandons the very policies on which they were elected it renders the
notion of a free vote equally invalid. If I vote for one party because of their
stance on a particular pressing issue, but then that party chooses not to
pursue the agenda which got them into power what is the point of democracy? A
recurring Soviet joke about the stagnant state was that “they pretend to pay us
and we pretend to work”.
Place your 'X' against the candidate of your choice...
When it comes to it, we are just voting machines for
equally robotic vote machines which obey the directions of higher authorities.
The decisions are not made from the ground up. We pretend to vote and they
pretend to represent us. As a result more and more members of the population
are detached from the levers of power and rely instead on their real friends
and allies – the little people who live in their phones. So why don’t we cut
out the middle men, the pointless mounds of quivering flesh who pose as
politicians. They say we are entering the age of machines; I say bring on the
robots!
