The Labour candidate in my constituency, John Cowan, was suspended recently, leaving an interesting situation. At the last election, the Conservatives took 26,374 votes, Lib Dems 17,750 and Labour 11,936. Labour votes are likely to drift to the Lib Dems, giving them a chance of a surprise gain. This led to a flurry of last-minute leafleting by them, but my gut tells me they’ll fall short.
The incumbent Tory MP, James Paice, is a very good constituency MP and I was tempted to vote for him.
But I have very mixed feelings about this election. Whoever wins will wind up being blamed for the austerity measures that will be imposed – regardless of who wins – later this year. I’d like that to be Labour. But it won’t be. And we’d all pay a heavy price for Labour returning to power, even if it did mean they had to impose the cuts they’ve necessitated. To summarise, I have no enthusiasm for the Conservatives, none for the Lib Dems and less than none for Labour.
In the end, I decided to vote for a smaller party to send a message of dissatisfaction. For all the brass-buttoned blazers, UKIP is the only party to put representative democracy at the heart of its manifesto and I am not willing to be governed by a semi-hereditary European political class that seeks a range of power over everyday life that an absolute monarch would have looked at, whistled through his teeth, then decided would be too extreme. The EU is deeply and irredeemably corrupt, and political corruption is unacceptable.
As it happens, I’d happily live in a federal Europe, if the federation were loose and the powers limited, rather than made unlimited, by a constitution. I really don’t think the EU is reformable, so want out.
In other words, I have voted for democracy, this time round. Without effective democracy, the rest of the things we might debate are irrelevant, we can’t alter them.
