The General Election preamble is only two days old and already I'm bored shitless by it. That's what being politically bereft does for you. I mean, I know who I'm voting for on July 4, all I hope is that other people in D&G realise there's only one political party that can unseat Alistair Jack and a vote for Labour or the Liberals will probably mean the Tory gets back in. If just one of these two 'making up the numbers' parties had pulled out of the last election and told their voters to vote SNP we would have had one less Tory seat in Scotland...
So, why am I politically bereft if I'm voting for the SNP. Well, because I'm fed up with politics and the mainstream press's relentless attacks on the SNP (and Corbyn's Labour and the Liberals) might not have made me change my mind about them, but they have worn me down to the point where I'd like to have a General Election with genuine candidates with coverage that is not weighted in some way towards the Establishment in England. Don't get me wrong, I'm used to politicising, but when you get Scottish Tories moaning about the SNP's handling of the NHS or education and you only have to look south of the border to see the chaos rained down on England by 14 years of Tory strip mining, it seems a bit rich when Scottish Tories complain about how the SNP are doing when we all know the country would almost be as bad as England if these narcissistic wankers were in charge up here.
As a 'life long' Labour supporter (or at least that's what I believed I was until Kid Starver started ripping up the Labour handbook), I am not tempted back to this once great political party, at least not while they run around acting like not-so-bad Conservatives, because they think that 20% of swing voters mean more than anything else, especially at a time when a fucking bath sponge could stand against most of the Tories and win by a country mile.
A dear friend of mine once said to me, "All that happens is we just get the government back in, doesn't matter what colour flag they wave, they only care about us when we have to vote, after that we just become collateral damage." I've looked at politics for best part of the last two decades and felt we need something new, something honest with some integrity that puts the people first and worries about everything else second. A politics that explains to the idiots, wankers and ignorant about the real benefits of all the things they've been taught to hate - why immigration is a good thing; why disabled people need looking after; why it isn't everyone else's fault the country is in a mess; why it's the lack of investment in people and services that has made it difficult to see a doctor or go for a swim without someone's shit floating past your head; why the roads are more like the Somme than tarmac. Yet we live in a land where it must surely be single mothers' fault that everything has gone to the dogs.
This is a country that froths at the mouth when someone receiving benefits gets a fiver more than YOU think they deserve, but shrugs its shoulders and ignores it when millionaires get tax breaks or avoid paying their fair share or that shareholders get all the money that should be used to fix the public services they've destroyed. This is a country where attacking the innocent is far more fun than complaining about the fact everything is broken and no one wants to fix it.
So, here we are, in a General Election that I'm totally ambivalent about because none of the likely winners are saying anything that I want to hear and aren't really saying anything any other ordinary people wants to hear either. We're going to get useless soundbites about GDP and not being enough money and austerity 2.0 and any other meaningless bullshit that means they can avoid answering the questions that need to be answered. Oh and while we have pointless journalists who won't or don't ask the right questions, we're still going to wait until the end of time for the answers we want.
My best advice? You have to vote tactically. If you want the Tories out, then find out which party came second last time and whether there's the support for them this time around. Don't think about voting Labour if the Libdems or SNP or Plaid or Independent can win; sometimes a vote for Labour allows the Tories to win and sometimes allowing Labour to win a seat that a Libdem, SNP or some other could win is absolutely just as bad.
If you don't like politics, or football, or sports in general and the weather continues to remain shit, all you have is my deepest sympathy for the coming three months. It might be time to find a new hobby.
