A few years ago I couldn't give a toss about politics. Even after I reached voting age and was determined to use my right (people have died to give me the chance to have my say) I still wasn't at all fascinated. To date I have always voted Liberal Democrat and could be heard to say that "they were the best of a bad bunch".
I started to give a miniscule rat's arse about the policies of those whom we elect to be in power roughly five years ago. These people, who were all but faceless to me, are the ones we put in a job with a salary in excess of £50,000 and whom we trust to make the right choices for us as a population.
Then Twitter threw itself into my path. I signed up without really giving it a second thought. It was another way to keep in touch with online friends. Soon I upgraded to a smartphone which really started my tweeting frenzy which hasn't really let up in the two years since.
I've used Twitter has a place to have a ruddy good old rant about myriad subjects. It's a forum away from The Book of Faces where a lot of my relatives can see my status updates, and gives me the chance to spout my liberal tirades away from the more right-wing tendencies of certain members of my family.
As is the nature of time and its passing, the 2010 General Election hove into sight and I leapt into the fray behind Nick Clegg without a backwards glance. I followed his account, my then-MP's account, Chris Huhne's and the Winchester candidate's, these latter two being the next closest constituencies to mine.
I fully believed that the Lib Dems stood a jolly good chance of getting their most decent showing for absolutely ages and that David Cameron was an abhorrent windbag who wouldn’t be able to fight very well against the living memory of 18 years of his bloody party before Tony Blair.
Okay, so Cameron didn’t win an outright majority, though to listen to him prattle on you’d think so – uh, Mr Cameron, if you did, why the hell did you have to form a coalition government? Oh yeah. BECAUSE YOU DIDN’T GET A MAJORITY OF SEATS.
For the week following the election, I had great hope that a coalition would be formed between Labour, the Lib Dems and the few others here and there that would’ve created a majority of seats. After all, wasn’t everything Mr Clegg pointing towards his party’s policies being of a similar lefty bent as Labour’s? Gordon Brown remaining as Prime Minister was a much more palatable prospect than a bloody right-wing, privileged toff in No. 10.
I’m a damned fool. Of course Clegg got in bed with Cameron. After all, the Lib Dems are SUCH a match with the Tories. Aren’t they? Yes. I was shocked, I was absolutely dismayed when the news of a deal broke, and hated the sight of that press conference in the garden. I remained somewhat hopeful though. We were all told in the news that there were deal breakers in the formation of the coalition government; that the Lib Dems would temper the heavy-handedness of the Tory policies.
Bollocks.
We’re coming up on two years down the line and not a week has passed without some new Cameron-backed policy being trumpeted in the right wing press, derided in the lefty papers or sneaked out as quietly as possible because it’s total lunacy.
And what do we see of the Lib Dems? In recent weeks, not much at all of Mr Clegg (or the spineless wonder I now believe is a more fitting, if not to say polite, name for him). And of the others in the cabinet? Seemingly wheeled out when a boorish Tory needs someone to take the flack for some rotten pile of codswallop.
We’ve had, among others:
Two sets of riots
Strike action
Job cuts
Rising unemployment
The economic recovery seems to be resident in the same realm as the Tooth Fairy and the Easter Bunny
Local budget cuts leading to the closure of libraries and the withdrawal of services
Cuts to benefits for the most vulnerable members of society
Effective cuts to the budget of the BBC
Reams of rhetoric telling us there is no money for any of this
An Olympics which is costing billions yet which we are told ad nauseam will plough even more back into the economy
A royal wedding which was also a drain on the public coffers and which we were also told would generate a lot of revenue (but the extra bank holiday we were given has since been blamed by Gideon as the reason for another quarter of poor growth)
The potential sale of forests
A bible being given to every school pupil (even though ‘there’s no money’)
And the effective privatisation of the NHS, an institution which has seen the improvement in the health of the less well off in this country, of which there must be hundreds of thousands.
How are the Lib Dems tempering the Tory’s running roughshod over those of us (and there are a LOT of us) who were not born with silver spoons jammed up our arses? And with Mr Cameron giving Alex Salmond even more firepower to progress the split of Scotland from the UK, I just can’t see how the rest of us can fight off further Tory governments without the aid of Labour constituencies in that fine country. In my constituency, Labour really don’t stand a chance, it’s either LD or Tory.
So right now, I can’t help but think, what's the bloody point? Why should I care anymore? I’ve always used my vote but look where that’s got us. I’m thoroughly ashamed I appear to have wasted it on the Liberal Democrats because of the government we’ve been landed with thanks to Mr Spineless-Wonder, yet had I voted Labour that would’ve been wasted too. Plus, on the day of the election, how was I to know that Spineless was even more of a lying shit that I assumed many politicians to be already?
So tell me. What is the bloody point in caring anymore? Because I don’t fucking well know.
You will never find a more wretched
hive of scum and villany.
