It's Make Your Mind Up Time

Oh yabadabadoo, it's election time again!

New policies are announced on a daily, no - hourly - basis.  Every issue is reduced to soundbites to reach, one presumes, the least eloquent of the populace. It's crisis this and crisis that, a void of real ideas dressed up as hard-line policy, and underneath it all gurgles the TV news and newspapers' cesspit of sleaze, smoke and mirrors.

Once upon a time, people voted for their beliefs.  A simple choice - you either voted for someone who promised to give everything and make a minority pay, or you voted for the power of the individual.

Now we have so many conflicting ideals and issues.  Should the NHS provide everything for everybody with anything from a verruca to cancer?  Should it provide calming drugs for those who just don't feel right in this world?  Should we let more people in, and if not who is going to pay the tax to pay my pension?  Should a professional person with a conscience be barred from practising their profession and representing constituents?

At the bottom of it all is, of course, money.  An MP's salary of £67,060 is seen as a huge amount of money to a large proportion of the population, but a huge pay cut to someone who has reached the upper echelons of a true profession.  So eventually, we will have no truly educated or seasoned people in politics, just the yes-men who earn their MPs' salaries by studying politics and doing whatever the party tells them to do.

All of our politicians seem to think that everybody should be able to go to university, regardless of whether they have the talent and the discipline to achieve a truly valuable degree or not.  And the expectation is that half of them will never earn enough (£16,910 a year) to repay the loan.  Well excuse me for stating the bleeding obvious, but what on earth is the point of spending three years or more of your life at university and at the end of it earning less than £16,910 a year?  Maybe you shouldn't have gone in the first place.  Maybe you should have bought a calculator instead of that last pot noodle!  I'm sure half the kids that go to uni only go because their parents would be embarrassed if they didn't. 

Anyway, I'm going to hazard a guess at the result of the 2015 election.  And that is that we'll have more of the same.  The Conservatives will win the most seats, and why?  Because in the media circus in which we now live, parties are effectively their leaders and I don't think enough people will believe that Ed Miliband has the tools for the task.  Maybe David Cameron doesn't have all of them either, but he seems to have a more credible presence, and more right to be there than Ed.

We'll see if I'm right...