Machine Politics

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”.

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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!