Moustaches You Can Trust

I switched on the radio today for the first time in over 4 months. Turned out that there’d been some local elections and a referendum on whether to replace something called FPTP with something called AV. I’m not registered to vote, so I didn’t vote.

If I’d had a vote, I’d have used it to vote for FPTP and against all the main parties. My reasoning is simple: I’m sick of people fucking around with our political system. I don’t have any trust in the political class, and if they want to change something as fundamental as how votes are counted, it can only be because they see some thieving advantage to themselves. Because they sure as heck don’t want to represent the people of this country.

How do I know? Because I’m a smoker, and no politician pays any attention to us, even though we make up a quarter of the population. Nor does the media. They ignore us too. We may as well not exist. In fact, as far as they’re concerned, we don’t exist. If they can do that to a quarter of the population, then it can’t be too difficult to ignore everybody else as well.

I thought I was getting pretty disenchanted with politics a year or so ago, but I seem to have become even more disenchanted since then. I don’t want to know what these politicians think, or what they say, or what they do. Because there’s nothing I can do about it, except vote against them whenever I get a chance. I would’ve turned off the radio shortly after I’d turned it on, but it was on the other side of the room, and I couldn’t be bothered to get up and walk over to it. And I’d stopped listening anyway.

It must’ve been like this in East Germany back before German re-unification. Did anyone in East Germany actually listen to Ulbricht and co., or watch him on their Trabant TVs? Probably not. What was the point? There was nothing they could do about him. The Communists would always be re-elected. Well, it’s the same with us now. The professional politicians just keep on being re-elected, and then just go and do whatever the hell they want.

Nobody wanted a smoking ban, and there was no need for it, but we got one anyway. Nobody believes in global warming, but we’re going to get the stupid windmills anyway. Nobody wants to be a member of the EU, but we’re signed up to it anyway.

On days like this, I seriously wonder why anyone votes for any of the three main parties. I heard  today that the Lib Dems had done very badly, and that it was punishment for going into a coalition with the Conservatives, and tearing up their manifesto in order to do so. Really? What did their voters expect? The main parties just promise whatever they think will win them votes, and then do something completely different. Labour did it with their manifesto promise to permit smoking in wet-led pubs. The Conservatives did it when Cameron made a ‘cast-iron’ guarantee for a referendum on the Lisbon Treaty, and then reneged on it (naturally). The Lib-Dems tore up many of their manifesto pledges within minutes of the election last year. They’re all doing it. Why is anyone surprised or angry? If you vote for any of the main parties, you’re more or less telling them to do whatever the hell they like, regardless of what they may have promised before an election. And since they’re going to do that, why vote for one lying party rather than another?

Maybe that’s why the Scots voted for the Scots Nationalists. Because they at least sound like they might really mean what they say, whether people like their policies or not. Same with UKIP. And the BNP. As trust in the main parties collapses, voters will start taking pot luck with Anybody Else.

And this may be why all the politicians seem quite sure that the Lib-Con coalition government will last the full 5 years. It’s because politicians are getting more and more terrified of an increasingly disenchanted and volatile electorate. So they want to minimize the frequency of elections. They’d really prefer that there only be elections at 10 or 20 year intervals. Or, better still, none at all.

The way things are going, all I can see up ahead is increasing voter volatility, as they switch from party to party looking for somebody – anybody – who’ll actually, y’know, represent them. Someone they can trust. They’ll be looking for deeds, not words. Substance rather than spin. Truth rather than lies. They’ll be looking for men of principle. Any principle at all.

There’ll likely be sudden changes in the political landscape, as minor parties attract the huge wandering herds of disenchanted voters. The old parties – the lying parties – will dwindle away. You’ll find surprising new faces elected to power. They’ll be people who mean to do exactly what they say, and not something else. They’ll be people who aren’t prepared to compromise their convictions an iota. They’ll probably have stern faces and jutting jaws.

And, who knows, some of them may even have those trim little moustaches which were quite fashionable 70 or 80 years ago. Not extravagant moustaches that curl up at the ends. Nor soup-strainer moustaches. But moustaches you can trust.