I foresee an outbreak of absolute apathy at the next election.
You don’t need a crystal ball to recognise great numbers of folk are fed up with empty boasts of political parties who promise the earth and fail to deliver.
Spoiled ballot papers with ‘None of the above’ scribbled on them might be among the most polite form of words to feature, with many voters scunnered at politicians who seem more out of touch with public opinion than I can ever remember.
Towards all of the political parties there seems to be a wave of voter revulsion at a political class which embrace causes barely relevant to the vast majority of folk who are trying to eke out their wages and salaries to pay inflated shopping and energy bills, mortgages and rents.
The indifference of voters towards all parties seems infectious.
I’m speaking to more and more people who don’t intend to vote at all at the General Election and if that sense of detachment continues I see the same happening at the Scottish elections.
Limited life experiences
For a while we seem to have been drawing our politicians from increasingly narrow and rarefied backgrounds: folk who come straight out of university into political research jobs, then into parliament.
Their limited life experiences can be written on the back of a fag packet, something which is abundantly clear when we see the sort of narrow interests they’re trying to force on an electorate which doesn’t share their minority obsessions.
The Tories have had fourteen years in power to come up with a vision of what a fairer and more equitable country might look like, but have achieved little other than bitter infighting and the likelihood of electoral wipe-out.
Labour seem a sure-fire bet to deal the Conservatives a massive knockout blow.
But they too are riven as usual by their infantile left-wing carping from the sidelines and the party has traditionally been hostage to a section of virtue signalling Marxists who prefer to beat their breasts than beat the Tories, as one MP put it.
Sir Keir Starmer’s vision of what he hopes to achieve looks woolly and vague and although he holds a massive lead over Rishi Sunak’s embattled troops, it seems that many casting their vote for him will be doing so more as a protest vote than any ringing endorsement of a galvanised Labour party.
In Scotland, the SNP appear on course to lose swathes of their MPs.
Between ongoing police investigations and a struggling leader in Humza Yousaf – who as justice secretary was responsible for the chillingly dangerous Hate Crime and Public Order (Scotland) Act 2021 due to become law on April 1 – their prospects of halting the Labour revival are evaporating daily.
‘We let zealots take over parties’
However, voter disenchantment and indifference isn’t something to be celebrated.
The reason we’ve arrived at the current mess is because too many of us opted out and let the zealots take over the various parties.
They’ve been pretty much free – and unchallenged – to pursue policies which many voters regard as irrelevant and daft and now we’re paying the price with a political cadre totally ignorant of the real needs of voters.
The only solution is to vote for the least bad option of the big parties or, even better, give independent candidates unencumbered by party dogma a chance.
I don’t think it can be any worse to elect some free thinkers than the current party conformists mindlessly towing their party line.
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