Sunday 22 May 2016

I’m turned off!

"What the hell is he on about?” I hear you cry, he hasn’t even bothered to give us a new blog in almost six months and now he decides to publish something polemic and incendiary. I’m sure you’re thinking: ‘but I signed-up for food, travelogues and witty banter’, rest assured, there will be more of this to come! However, as a lifelong politico, I feel that I must raise my head above the parapet and indicate how thoroughly cheesed off I am with the current state of affairs. 
More and more, I am becoming disenchanted with the UK Government, opposition and the deeply, deeply unimpressive calibre of a large number of elected politician. As a passionate supporter of the Conservative party, this appalling referendum has brought some of the worst excesses to the surface. 

I’m turning off more and more as I hear ‘the failure’, Iain Duncan Smith, throwing toys out of his metaphorical pram willy-nilly. His arrogant, drawling rhetoric disingenuously claiming he’s acting in the interests of the people when, in actual fact, it’s more a personal crusade. It’s a great way to mask how relatively ineffectual I believe he’s been over the many years I’ve observed him. 

Equally, the gimmicky Queen’s Speech earlier this week shows that this government is stagnating under a powerful group of bloody-minded, self-serving MPs who cannot seem to rationalise and compromise for the greater good. I’d like to see some of the policy I voted for in 2010 and 2015 actually be implemented rather than have this system held to ransom by a tyranny of the minority. 

Many like to talk about principles, well I say sod off, go and work in a different industry. Politics is about pragmatism, adaptation and evolution. Both sides of the house are seeming to suffer from an unhealthy degree of hubris which has consigned them to pointless, bitter in-fighting that impresses neither their supporters or the wider electorate as a whole.

I don’t envy Cameron’s position, but a braver man would seek to drive through unpopular, necessary policies, taking a risk to implement positive change.

The lacklustre performance of the opposition is lamentable and, how they could become embroiled in an anti-Semitism row (much of it whipped-up by the media) demonstrate how it is ever-spiralling out of control into irrelevance. 

For interested parties, the whole thing is a sorry state of affairs! a couple of weeks ago, for the first time in my voting life, I spoiled my ballot paper in the mayoral elections. I thought Zac’s campaign was scurrilous and I cannot vote for Sadiq because I deeply disagree with his political vision. 

Furthermore, both waxed on and on about unity, social concepts and the like. As I sit here now, writing this, delayed on a London Overground, I was gobsmacked at how no candidate wanted to discuss the one and only thing I cared about in this race for mayoralty, transport (in particular trains and tubes). I have no regrets on spoiling the ballot and would do it again at the General Election if there was no choice.

At the end of the day our elected representatives need to get their heads out of their own fundaments and start looking at practicalities and real problems opposed to intellectual dramas cooked up in their ivory towers!


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