Nearly There

We are now in the final few days before the UK General Election, thank goodness some might say. It seems to have been dragging on forever even though it has only been just over four weeks. I cannot imagine how our American cousins manage with an election cycle that spreads over more than a year. Have I learnt anything over the last few weeks, apart from the fact that politicians of all hues have sunk to new lows? None have really addressed the real issues that face the country; all have basically lied to us. The banality of the campaign has been astounding.

Let us go to the chicken and egg question, do we get the politicians that we deserve or do they dumb down for us. I think that I get a biased view because I tend to mix with a people who are very engaged with the political process; indeed some of them are active within it. However I am forced to admit that the majority of the population are not involved, and indeed are unduly influenced by the prism, often biased, of the media.

I took a quiz the other day about local statistics, this asked various local questions such as how many people are on jobseekers allowance, what the average wage is etc…. Now I should be well informed on this sort of thing but I was hugely wrong, not just a little bit out, but a long way out. Now why is this, it is very difficult to obtain objective information, much of the language is very incendiary, so we hear of a “flood” of immigrants etc.. This colours our views. Locally our media has been completely emasculated; we are reliant on websites of questionable heritage.

So how do people get objective information, I am open to ideas; it is ironic that in this information where we have a plethora of means of obtaining information from a huge number of sources we actually know less.

I leave you with a small example. Last week the Conservatives said that they would legislate against any tax increases. This is complete toot, in the last parliament they legislated that they would pay down the country’s deficit, and guess what they did not do it. What sort of sanction did they face, hanging, flogging, public humiliation…. you guessed it nothing at all!!!

Roll on Thursday.