A few days ago I voted, walked down the road, and into a few conservatives who were going door-to-door. I walked past them and then turned around to go talk to them.
So I approached and said that I have concerns about global sustainability. That's a discussion for another time.
He said to me, "How are the [insert party other than ours here] going to help with that?"
I had to answer, of course, "I actually don't know."
He said, "I find that interesting," in a tone that let me know exactly how much contempt he had for me.
It's really easy for me to get washed away in waves of conservative hate when David Cameron's slimy, smarmy, often-airbrushed face is all over the place. I tend to forget that a political party is made up for more than just David Cameron clones. However, I think there are two issues here:
1) I should have been more diligent in researching the issues that are important to me.
2) Politics is an incredibly muddy area, full of people with their own agendas, and it's incredibly hard to see through it to find out exactly what you want to know.
Of course, I can go and talk to all of the party representatives out there that I want, but the fact is that they are going to be putting a spin on everything that they say, one way or the other. Even if they don't intend to. It's difficult to trust a representative of any party, even the one you voted for!
What I would like is an impartial source that would be an encyclopedia of each party's policies, right next to the existing policy that it is going to be changing. No rhetoric: bullet points, numbers, dates, specifics. If you go onto any of the parties' websites or manifestos, you tend to get broad generalizations and specifics.
If wishes were horses, however, I'd have enough power to run my apocalyptic doomsday device that's currently in low orbit.
In my defense, my vote wasn't just the result of me throwing a dart at the ballot sheet. It's built up of all the political information I, as an interested and intelligent dude, have absorbed over nearly three years in this country.
That isn't to be underestimated. However, I needed to be more scientific about it - I needed to have done my research and found out the specifics. When three conservative spokesmen are looking down their noses at you, it probably isn't a good idea to say, 'I had a gut feeling.'
So what am I trying to say in this rather unfocused post? First, we as voters need to be more diligent in finding out the details of the parties that are going to determine the future of this party. However, those parties need to take some responsibility for better informing their voters of just what it's going to mean if/when they get into power.
Also, I would like it if they got down off their damn high horses and started treating us less like potential votes and more like people.
I leave you with a link to David Cameron's interview with the brilliant Jeremy Paxman.
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