ELECTION BLUES - PROMISES, LIES AND DECEIT

With the General Election campaign now in full swing, we are getting all the usual promises, lies and deceit from all of the main parties.

Labour, the party which was largely responsible, in this country, for the banking deregulation which led to the financial disaster of 2008, now says that it will manage the economy far better than those nasty Tories and will create a 'fairer society'. Of course, what they really mean is that they'll introduce even more laws to force people to do things their way, will dramatically increase taxes and reduce benefits for anyone who actually still has anything, and will borrow to the hilt. The result would be an even bigger mess than they created before and , no doubt, would be worsened still further by an almost certain pact of some type with the ultra left wing Scottish and Welsh nationalists, plus the egregious Greens.

The Liberals, a party which is likely to lose a good many of its current 60 or so seats, has, as usual, tried to be 'all things to all men' while also being simply another left of centre shambles. In my own constituency, the hopeful Liberal is standing on a platform of bringing greatly enhanced NHS services to the area, something which he knows full-well can never happen but of which potential voters have no understanding; it is a straightforward deception designed to con people into voting in a particular way. This is actually what the Liberals tend to do everywhere and yet they still seem to get away with it.

As for the Conservatives, their campaign seems to be all about 'steady as she goes' while promising to pump yet more money into the failed NHS. Thus far, they have made no real progress in the campaign and have, instead, slipped on one or two banana skins. Their problem is that their leader is an uninspiring rich boy, as are so many of their other leading lights, and they seem to be as out of touch with reality as it's possible to be. They make wild promises about the economy, the NHS, education, immigration and so on, as of course do all of the other parties, but they have no coherent strategy. They claim to be a right of centre party but are, in fact, wallowing around in the centre trying to sound tough while doing as little as possible.

For someone whose first General Election experience was in 1974, this is all too familiar and depressing. Only during the reign of Margaret Thatcher did we have a government which ever did more than pay lip service to its principals and, even then, it was not all plain sailing. Almost every government over the years has failed while claiming huge success; the population are beset with more and more ludicrous laws, less justice and vast increases in taxation to feed the ever hungry State. Our education system is shot to pieces, our NHS so long passed its 'sell by' date that it belongs in a museum. Immigration is completely out of control and our society is more divided than ever before in our history; our industrial base has all but been destroyed and vast numbers of people rely on the State for hand outs of ever increasing range and complexity.

This is the legacy of decades of government by people whose principal interest is themselves. Our politicians rarely have any interest in anything but getting elected and climbing the greasy pole; election promises have no meaning to them and voters are an irrelevance except at election time, when the same old promises, deceits and lies are trotted out, and most of the population dutifully goes out and votes the way they did last time and the time before that and the way that their parents did. Politicians know this and know that only a small number of seats usually change hands at an election. Therefore, they know that, whatever they say or do, their jobs are safe.

It's time to shake them up a bit by voting for one of the smaller parties. I say Vote UKIP, the only one of the smaller parties which doesn't want to bankrupt us or break up the Union, but does want to save us from the European nightmare. They may not be 'whiter than white' on everything but they are the only real alternative to what's gone before.