vote early, vote often

I have cast my votes, all three of them, since as well as the parliamentary election we have district council elections, put a cross in up to two boxes.  I always vote.  When my grandmothers were born women didn't even have the vote, and I am jolly well using mine.  And no, there should not be a 'none of the above' box.  Ticking that would be to fail to grapple with the real choices in front of you.  A party that could deliver lower taxes and simultaneously fund a better health service, more generous financial support for everybody who deserves it, good schools for all, and a world class concert hall for London would be a splendid thing.  But since there isn't one able to deliver all that, or even universal free ice cream and kittens on Fridays to everybody who wants them, we're left with making the best of what's actually on offer.

And an uninspiring choice it is too.  If it's true that we get the politicians we deserve then we should be pretty worried.  The Systems Administrator and I normally love election campaigns, following every interview and discussion on the Today Programme, the World at One, the evening news and Pienaar's Politics with keen interest.  We've sat glued to the TV on election night watching the results come in, but I don't think we will be this time round.  The quality of debate has been so meagre, so dishonest, sound-bitey, shouty, superficial, and trivial, that we've watched and listened to less news in the past three months than ever in the previous decade.  And the photo ops have been so embarrassingly fake.  Samantha Cameron painting a bench in a community garden while wearing a smart safari jacket, holding the paintbrush well away from her body as if it might bite.  Who is that supposed to impress?  If you're going to paint a community bench then wear overalls or an old t-shirt.  Or better still do some relevant voluntary work for the other fifty weeks of the year that could feature in the election campaign, mentoring disadvantaged youngsters in paid internships at Smythson, perhaps.

Radio 4's Dead Ringers had the leaders of the two main parties banged to rights.  David Cameron does sound exactly as though he were talking to an eight year old who wouldn't put their pyjamas on.  He's sounded like that for quite a while, as though the interviewer and by extension the listening public were rather common and rather dim, and it was trying his patience having to waste his time with us.  But Red Ed is no better.  What happens if you don't win an overall majority, Mr Milliband?  But I want one!  Wanty, wanty, wanty.  And as for Grant Shapps, who on earth can not remember whether they were juggling to still fit their business activities in after they became an MP?  Since that episode the Tories seem to have padlocked Mr Shapps in a box, for we've heard nothing from him in the later stages of this election.  But Ed Balls is so annoying that I have to run across the kitchen when he comes on and switch the radio off, or over to the soothing tones of R3, or Classic FM if R3 is having a Ligeti moment.

And when was UK national politics reduced to a list of micro-promises to special interest groups? Two hundred million pledged to this small subsector of voters, three hundred and fifty million to that.  The other parties' pledges rubbished because they can't say exactly where the two hundred million is going to come from, when the size of the national economy is umpteen billions and two hundred million is smaller than a rounding error in the grand scheme of things.  Where is the grand scheme of things?  We seem to have plunged into an era of pork barrel politics that would put a US state contest to shame.  Although I am losing track of the number of projects the proceeds of the mansion tax is going to fund.  Just as in the Middle Ages the pieces of the true cross would have made a cross a mile high if they were all collected and stuck together, so with the things Labour is going to pay for from the mansion tax.

Voting wasn't as painful as it might have been given my disgust with every one of the main parties, since I rate my constituency MP and have a lot of time for my district councillor, who I do vaguely know.  And it's a safe Tory seat anyway so it wouldn't have made any difference to the outcome if I hadn't voted.  And ghastly as most of the Conservative front bench are, I would rather have George Osborne as Chancellor than Ed Balls.  I think the Tories have some vague glimmer of an idea that if you want a decent health service, education system and all, you need to foster a spirit of enterprise to generate the wealth to pay for them, whereas the Eds will busy themselves micromanaging the redistribution of what wealth there is until it is all gone.  And these are the politicians that we deserve.