It’s coming up to a fortnight until polling day in the 2015 General Election, and I still don’t have a clue who to vote for.
No clear winner
The problem I have in deciding, is that no one single party is giving me enough reasons to vote for them yet. When I look at my own personal situation, I haven’t done bad over the past five years. I have bought my first home with my girlfriend, started my own business, grew an existing one, and had a record year last year at our family run installation business. But I put a lot of that down to the hard work, immense effort and late nights to make all of that happen. I can’t honestly say that all that success is down to the coalition and their policies. When I look at the state of the country right now, the North/South divide is bigger than ever before. There are more people using food banks than ever before. NHS in crisis over funding. We’re weaker than Greece when it comes to the EU and negotiating a better deal for the UK. A crippling housing shortage. A skills shortage. When it comes to a recovery, you couldn’t get more unbalanced if you tried. So even though my own personal position is OK, I can’t give an honest vote to a party which has still done a lot wrong.
The alternatives aren’t much better. Whilst Labour say they will stand for the hard working, which is an honourable pledge, I don’t much trust them to keep a reign in on spending. Plus, can you imagine Miliband having serious high level talks with other world leaders such as Obama and Merkel? No, me neither. I voted Lib Dem last time, and look what happened there. The only UKIP policies I can agree with is their EU stance and pledge to fund the NHS and defence, but disagree completely with their immigration policy. The Greens would have us defend against enemies with sticks, and the SNP and Plaid Cymru I can’t even vote for.
The lesser of all the evils
The fact of the matter is I have to vote for someone. And don’t say that I don’t have to vote, I am a strong believer that we should all vote. Firstly, because there are many, many people dying across the world right now trying to fight for their own democracies and a better life. We should not waste our own chance to exercise our right to make our point. But secondly, I don’t believe people should be complaining all that much about the state of the UK if they didn’t vote themselves.
I have to vote for one party though. But who do I vote for? Lets face it, whichever way I go, it’s going to be a hung parliament and some sort of multi-party deal has to be done. So should I vote for the party that I think would have most influence in any sort of new coalition? Do I vote for the party already in, even though I’m uncomfortable with an unacceptably high poverty rate and highly unbalance recovery? Do I vote for the party that says they will stand up for hard working every day people, but with a less than polished track record on spending?
I have some thinking to do. But whatever the result on May 8th, the good news for me is that I’ll be away from the ensuing chaos, on a beach thousands of miles away, sun bathing and swimming!
