Day two of the 2010 election campaign, and as I drove up past a rather sinister looking Triumphal Arch, see picture above, I took a few moments out to grab a shot of it. I believe it was trying to tell me something, it was erected as a rejection of the policies of Lord North and the monarch George III, with their unpopular civil war against the American Colonialists. I would love to change the inscription to address the issue of the corrupt parliamentarians of our time, to: “Victory by the People of Britain over their Corrupt Political Class, 2010”.
Sadly I don’t think the problem will be properly addressed, the MP’s who are standing down are slipping quietly away, clutching their massive (by normal standards) index linked pensions, and large termination bonuses, (designed to help them back into the real world, sick joke). No real measures have been taken against them, for what would clearly be fraud in any other employment. They don’t give a “Tinker’s Cuss”, just out for themselves, and we look on in amazement but do nothing!
OK! 3 Labour MP’s and 1 Tory member of the Lords are charged with expenses fraud, but they are token patsies, what about all the others who are quietly hoping the whole thing will slide from the media radar. The other issues facing the country are so great that their indiscretions are small change. So we will pay, pay for their lifestyles, their mistakes, in and out of office!
Turning to the state of the economy; I recall talking to many people over the last 5+ years over the reckless state of the ballooning economy, specifically the housing sector, all agreed, not one person I spoke to said that the bubble was sustainable. Thus if I, and many others thought this, without any special knowledge, what were the Labour Government doing! Nothing! incompetent, useless! Do not let this go and put them back in office!
Of course it would be easy to imagine that voting for the Conservatives or to a lesser extent the LibDems, would change things, but would it? Sadly I doubt it, neither seems to me to be up to getting to grips with the problems we face. So the prospect of voting for a marginal party such as UKIP, who are capable of lucid and sensible ideas about the UK running its own affairs, and then, sadly, regular outbursts, of the type, “Shooting ones-self in the foot”, when making speeches in the European Parliament, what is one to do?
The Daily Mail, that paper beloved to be bashed by the endless volume of lefties in the media, with its outspoken Blogger: Peter Hitchens, suggests we should vote for anyone but the Conservatives, thus allowing the Labour Party to re-assume Government. I don’t think I could stand to see the “Cheshire Cat” grins on the faces of Brown, et al! I respect his (Hitchens) idea, that this would cause the Conservatives to collapse and a new breed of proper Conservatives would rise from the ashes, to rise in the future, phoenix like, to return the country to prosperity. But can we stand any more of the worst people ever to make an even bigger mess, I don’t think so. Remember the Gold sell off, inexperience beyond measure! The pension grab, outrageous! Depending on where you get your figures from, this government has squandered around £1,229,100,000,000 WOW! what a staggering sum!
Perhaps the solution is not to vote, or to spoil your ballot paper, on the basis that this could cause a serious constitional crisis if the vote was so low, say less than twenty percent. But can you really expect this to happen, I suspect it would not, this leaves me in a quandary, I would like to hear other views on this dilemma.