And no I don’t mean the Channel 4 programme, I mean that next Thursday 22nd May is the start of the countdown in earnest for the next general election.

Next Thursday the UK vote for their new MEP or Member of the European Parliament which is to me an anachronism in that they don’t actually legislate anything, that’s all done by ‘Brussels Edict’. So who is YOUR MEP? Don’t know? I’d be worried if you did because that would mean you are a keen follower of all things politically European. It’s estimated that MEPs are known to less than 5% of the population, mind you having said that many people don’t even know who their MP or Member if Parliament is and more to the point don’t care. The political parties should forget preaching to the converted, i.e. those, mostly older voters who are set in their ways and will never vote anything other than the same way that they have for up to  fifty years. No, the party political broadcasts need to aim their sights lower, but not in the intellectual sense, but in the age sense. New and recently qualified voters don’t, in the main, have a clue who they want to vote for. Normally it would be the party who would  directly affect their lives. This can be a North/South divide where working class areas, although I hate that expression, in the North vote labour and middle class voters (a term equally hated by me) in the south vote Tory or heaven forbid Liberal. So what do they do? Well I wouldn’t want their job for anything, trying to persuade mostly younger people to vote for them; most of these new voters, especially if they are disenfranchised or on job seekers allowance or other benefits would see  Labour as their benefactor, because they promise, occasionally, extreme riches for being unemployed and/or unemployable. I know I would vote for them if I was being promised a good standard of living for doing nothing. The coalition on the other hand and more especially the Tory Chancellor has had to make to tough decisions to claw back the mess the previous government left us in. We are at last on the up, slightly, but at what cost to the job seekers and those on benefits? They’ve been hit hard, but during the period of the last government they did rather well, while the rest of us toiled to provide them with unearned income. Now, don’t get me wrong, I’m no oppressor of the underprivileged, but the country couldn’t have gone on like it did, even though better-off folk have appeared to do all right as well. It’s a fine line, and I think the current opposition couldn’t really argue about the measures that had to be taken, and they have been remarkably quiet about it. So next May will be very interesting and could well result in another hung parliament, with maybe Labour and the Lib Dems getting into bed with one another, and completely screwing up the country with their largeese. Now I’m not a dyed-in-the-wool Tory, although I might have been once and I’m not a sycophantic supporter of them, but in the main I think they do a good job and will continue to do so in they win in May 2015. The only trouble is they won’t do well at the European and possible the local council elections, because any party in power traditionally don’t do so well mid term.  We’ll see.

Well you couldn’t expect me to pass up the opportunity to comment on the weather, so I won’t. At last some decent sunshine and higher temperatures. When will the first hosepipe ban be announced? So back to the government; it appears that Parliament is to close early because it has ‘run out of legislation’ to debate. Can’t see anything wrong with that especially if it means saving expenses and MPs costs. So what do we need political government for? We have governance, i.e. the machinations of running the country remain in place, but with out political interference does having Parliament make any difference? Well, Belgium went without a working government for 14 months and no-one seemed to notice. So the point I was trying to make is that is this country, or any other come to that, run purely on the whim of a few people who make the decisions blindly followed by the rest? Do we actually need politicians? Can we run the country in the best possible way, without politically biased decisions? The jury may be out for a long time, but consider this: government is not held to account for anything. Witness the Chilcot report, which was raised to investigate the Iraq war and the governments involvement in it at the time. Why has Chilcot not been published? Allegedly because private messages between Blair and Bush have been suppressed because Bush wanted revenge for 9/11 and thought wrongly (or ill- advised) that Iraq was to blame for the planes that crashed into the twin towers. So on the pretext of Weapons of Mass Destruction being stored in Iraq, later disproved, Bush got Blair’s backing to invade Iraq, because Saddam invaded Kuwait. This shouldn’t have been a basis to interfere so why did we, resulting in the death of 179 British servicemen and women during the conflict besides the hundreds injured and maimed. Similar invasions by neighbours haven’t resulted in interference by US and NATO forces so why did the Iraq war ensue? Bush and Blair need to be bought to book to answer the questions probably posed by Chilcot, but until his report is published we’ll never know. Apparently the PM wants the report published ‘by the end of the year’, but in any case before the general election mainly because when the truth comes out it will ruin Labours chance of winning in 2015.