Better red...

I really can’t understand why anyone is still surprised by the antics of our politicians. Why would they be when we are all aware that election promises will not only be broken but cynically overturned as soon as the votes are counted? Surely we expected this when we voted? Surely we knew that under their smiles and weasel words were lizards simply waiting to grind us all down with their self-serving plans and need for power and control? Surely we expect our nouveau Lords to snort coke and cavort with prostitutes, wear orange bras and leather jackets and basically spend our money on their own strange perversions. Why are we shocked or surprised? Wasn’t it ever so?

Let’s face it; you don’t become a politician by being a nice bloke. You have to have something else going on in your make-up, something that drives you, something that you will – at any cost – push through regardless of the consequences even if it is wearing a prostitute’s bra. Oh, you can wrap it up any way you want and use terms like elected representatives, democracy and choice, but in reality it’s hard for ordinary people to see through the lies or even understand that these people would promise anything, break any agreement, to get themselves in charge and have their own way.

I know that I do.

At the last election I voted conservative despite hating all of the Tories that are leading this country into becoming a smaller, far less important, America. In my case I was expecting a Lib-Dem coalition, a little sense injected into a Tory world that is becoming far too much like Germany in the thirties. Unfortunately I got it totally wrong and poor Nick Clegg, battered and dispirited, broken by his role as second fiddle sans bow, was ousted by us voters. In many ways at that time I believe he was our only hope.

Miliband never stood a chance. Unpopular and shifty-eyed, happy to stab his more popular and better looking brother in the back, a man pretending not to be a Tory when he had ‘almost Tory’ tattooed all over his seriously smug, slightly wrong face. No wonder Cameron won. As Kylie sang ‘Better the devil you know’, and then there was the Scottish threat to stoke the fires of fear as the Scottish threat so often does.

I’ve been advised by my conscience never to write about politics. I’m not very well informed and I am far too easily fooled. So in most ways I am just like the rest of the voting population, from idealistic kids straight out of school, to silly old ladies continually voting the way their dead husbands did. But we need a change and we need difference, so I’ve decided to ignore my conscience yet again.

How can you vote with any passion when at best the difference between the available parties is merely a couple of shades of washed out grey? Where is the red and the blue? Has it been lost somewhere in the mediocrity of failure, spreadsheet political accounting and point scoring? Has it faded and turned to beige?

I think I can feel a very slight breeze of change and I begin (at long last) to feel the need for that change to happen. I don’t want our children to be homeless and poor all their lives. I don’t want them to have to worry about how they pay for their children’s medical treatment or education or how they are going to keep them fed and warm through the winter. I don’t want them to fear the knock of the bailiff or the foreclosure of the bankers. I want them to have pensions, I want them to be cared for when they are old and not sit in their own piss all day. Maybe I am just getting old myself, or maybe I am thinking that I might make a tiny difference to the future if I can change my views a little.

Well, I can hope.

Last week I paid three quid to become a Labour Party supporter. I’m not (well at least not yet), but at least I now have allowed myself the option. My three quid buys me a vote in the Labour Party leadership election and my reason for doing this was simple. I listened to Jeremy Corbyn and what he was saying made sense to me. We do need to build council housing to provide homes, there is no need for a competitive gas and electricity industry so re-nationalise it and manage best price for all, of course the NHS should never be totally privatised and young people do have a right to a free-ish education.

I may not vote for him to be leader but at least I now have the chance to be involved if I want to. He might be a lefty, but at least he doesn’t wear a really expensive suit, dye his hair, use his hands to emphasise empty promises (as taught by a presentation coach), or give answers that don’t answer the questions. He seems to just answer the questions the way he feels and believes. Perhaps he isn’t a real politician at all.

Of course talking a case is easy, but he doesn’t strike me as a liar. He seems to be a fairly sensible and quite nice bloke who believes in what he is saying, not Michael Foot, not Tony Benn, certainly not Blair, just a man speaking about what he truly believes might work.

And it might.

What is it they say, ‘Better red than dead’?

I just hope he doesn’t wear an orange bra.