I’ll be voting for ‘noen of these’

It is almost as if the political establishment is becoming embarrassed by the lack of participation in this masquerade of democracy.

Because of the party political system employed, the outcome of this election will predictably result in the same old faces haranguing each other across the floor of Parliament. These are the same politicians who deplete our countries’ wealth embroiling us in wars that bring no benefit for our nation. They hand over our tax monies to bureaucrats in Europe and then tell us we must forego many essential services of our society because of their profligacy. They open our borders to economic migrants, which undermines the value of our own labour and then add insult to injury by claiming it is immoral for our citizens to avoid paying them the taxes they wish to squander.

They cite the tax avoidance of giant corporations as justification for their zealotry while ignoring that it is their own incompetence which resulted in the many “loopholes” available for said companies to exploit. Labour leader Ed Milliband recently claimed they would be targeting Hedge Funds rather than the hedge-cutting jobbing gardener. Can we really believe it will be the Captains of Industry and the financier friends and backers of the politician who will be prosecuted and jailed for tax avoidance? One indication of who the likely victims will be was when a neighbouring Labour MP reportedly “shopped” a local tradesman to the Inland Revenue for offering a discount for cash; just another example of their hypocritical morality, particularly when we remember the expenses scandal that enveloped Westminster in the not-so-distant past.

Politicians produce nothing of commercial value and therefore rely on taxation to deliver essential services and to finance their political machinations and lifestyle. Their claim to be our representative in government fails to hold water, they are our oppressors and their penal approach to taxation confirms this.

While no right-thinking citizen would object to paying fair and just taxes to maintain our nation’s infrastructure and national security, these current austerity measures amount to default by Government. We kept our part of the bargain by paying the taxes demanded, these charlatans took that cash but now renege on their part of the arrangement. In any other business this would be unacceptable and probably result in court action by the aggrieved party. Unfortunately the version of “democracy” presently available has been so fine tuned by the establishment it now contains no mechanism which would allow the electorate to do more than “tinker” with the outcome. Because of this, it should come as no surprise that so many fail to partake in this pointless exercise. There is a school of thought who believe that to abstain from voting is in itself a form of protest but this can also be interpreted as passive acceptance or plain laziness.

Alternatively, voting for the best of a bad bunch is hardly the answer and for my own part, in the absence of anything better than the current crop, I shall be attending the polling station to inscribe “none of these” across my ballot paper.

John Cave

Caernarvon Avenue, Burnley