My worry these days is that it's so easy for politicians to lie, or at least stretch the truth, that the man on the street doesn't actually know what a particular party's policies are going to be until they come to power. It seems that you have to be some political fanatic with insider knowledge to actually have a clue what the hell's going on.
And at the end of the day, it's normally the man on the street who is most likely to have his life adversely affected by the decisions made by Government. When I say "man on the street", I mean the increasingly ignored 'lower classes'. These days, if you earn less than £30k/(insert other unreasonably high arbritary figure here & delete as appropriate), it appears that your opinion, and the quality of your life mean nothing to the people whose wages you are paying. Sounds melodramatic, but as an increasingly disillusioned inhabitant of not just this country but the modern world, it's the way I've been made to feel.
I have an in-bred hatred of the tories, but to be fair, what does voting Labour or anything else really mean these days? Many of the people who voted Labour into power 9 years ago probably remember a time when the fact that a party had a different name and supposedly different values actually meant something, and assumed that things would change for the better when they helped to empower a party who used to at least try and look after the masses without whom the country would grind to a halt.
My problem with the stance that you are an idiot if you don't vote is that I honestly believe that the effective difference between voting and not these days is negligible. How can you possibly believe that any one party is going to comprehensively deliver all the values that you stand for? All right, this may never have been totally possible, but at least when there was a more tangible difference between the parties you stood a chance of at least having an inkling of what your vote was for.
The only reason I would vote these days is to place one more miniscule dent in the Conservative campaign. This may seem ill-informed and a waste of a vote, and that may be an accurate assessment - I don't claim to be particularly politically aware - but I know, or at least think I do, to assess that the Tories' ideals are more at odds with mine than those of any other parties.
I could go on and on and on about the virtues and otherwise, as I see them, of each party and politician, but what's the point?
The long and short of it is that I don't really know who to vote for, and it seems that every time you look up you see yet another twat with an insincere smile, which doesn't make it any easier. I work for a Government Department, and can safely say that most people would be shocked if they knew how their taxes were spent, but I don't honestly believe it would make much difference if another party came to power, because the things that actually matter seem to be the last on the agenda these days.
Back to the point of the thread, I have voted, but didn't in the last General Election. I wasn't actually registered at my address at the time so couldn't vote, but the worrying thing was that I wasn't actually that bothered.
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