Why Did I Bother?

Like many of you I went out to vote today as the Police & Crime Commissioner for Wiltshire needs to see what £70k p.a. will buy him over the next few years.

Thus far the barrage of information has been underwhelming, apparently according to my parents there was a time when candidates knocked on your door to speak to you personally. Now it only seems they do this for TV cameras and mainly because the uncertainty of knocking on a door that is then answered by somebody like my wife is something they would want to avoid. Not that she is violent or abusive, far from it, she just uses her super-power which she honed over years culminating in her winning the National Young Farmers Debating Competition. I have been privileged to see her in action and it is the verbal equivalent of seeing a lioness taking out a herd of wildebeest - they never stood a chance. That also is why we never have rows and I also have a shed to hide in.

Getting back to the lack of info on the candidates - yes it was all on line, but does this help 80yr old Mr Nugent Dirt who doesn't go anywhere near a computer? Does it buggery!!! All we had delivered was a rather ropey pamphlet with the retired, corpulent, pin-stripe ridden Tory candidates (and current PCC) toad like visage on the cover - the same face that shut quite a lot of police stations I might add and left Salisbury with something that is nothing more than a manned policebox hidden up a back-street (Mon-Fri, office hours only - please don't commit any crime outside these hours). Add to this the nearest custody suite is 90mins and 46miles away in Malmesbury. What a work of genius, he is obviously holding out for a title from Dave for all the good work.

Having looked at the four candidates online I was dismayed as they were the same old bag of nobodies:

1. Conservative: Angus Stuart 'Hang The Poor' Macpherson - judging by the name obviously a local!
2. Labour: Kevin 'Anything But' Small - judging by the size of him he's never walked around knocking on doors.
3. UKIP: John Fairlamb 'I'm F**king Potty' Short - Please don't get me started about this bunch of nutters.
4. LibDems: Brian 'They Made Me Stand' Mathew - Only there because he lost the arm-wrestle with the other LibDem.

All statements were the usual lot of party approved bullshit and with this in mind I made the long lonely trudge to the polling station with the following thoughts going through my head:

1. Before 1918 ordinary people like me were not allowed to vote, not to mention women.
2. So WWI did achieve something? That is at least 750,000 reason to vote for a start.
3. My Gran (born 1904) always voted for the aforementioned reasons above.
4. Do any politicians REALLY realise this and if not why not?
5. Isn't this lark just a way of politicising the police, who frankly were moribund before this came in.

On getting to the polling station (ironically in the Memorial Hall - memorial to the war dead I might add). I looked at the card and there were sadly no additional candidates to at least give me some hope that partaking in the democratic process is not just reserved for the political equivalent of processed cheese. No such luck, so being very British about it I decided not to spoil the paper and put a cross in a box as instructed.

I only voted for the last lot of reason above and not for a political party.