In Britain in 1997 the whole country was gearing up for the election, some people were dreaming of us becoming the “Young Nation” again, probably envisioning some horrendous videos to go with such a slogan too. Yes indeed, they were ready for the “New Way” to lay waste to the horrible, suited old order.

Meanwhile, the ‘Conservatives’ sat at home laughing at New Labour and their slogans, they knew nobody in their right mind would vote for these pseudo-socialist fools after the mess they made last time, or would they?

To wax personal for a brief moment: at the time I didn’t really know much about politics, nor did I care to. To me politicians were just a bunch of suits so far removed from my immediate reality that it seemed atrocious that any of them might try and influence on my life.

Regardless of this, nobody else would shut up about it. On the school bus a girl said to me “if you were old enough to vote, who would you vote for?” She said it in a way that made it very clear there was a right and a wrong answer, but I told her I probably wouldn’t vote at all. “But what if you had to?!” she wailed. So I bit the bullet and told her I’d probably vote Conservative. Cue short period of horror-induced silence. She, now outraged, told me how horrible the Conservatives were and that I ought to see the light that I assumed must shine out of one of Mr Blair’s orifices. However, I stuck to telling her that whilst I didn’t view either of them in a great light, it seemed to me the Conservatives had more substance and did more than promote someone ‘with it’ or ‘in touch with the youth’ just because they can play a guitar.

In a sense, I was right, that is to say that indeed all Labour could do was talk the talk and see people off with slogans and crass promotions, yet I was also wrong in thinking that they were the only guilty party. Modern politics is only gimmicks and bad acting, bearing more resemblance to professional wrestling shows than anything else. When these fools stand up in parliament they are literally taking a role, as anything they say seems completely separate from their private lives. Politician A whines about carbon emissions and the lack of wealth distribution before making a hasty exit to drive his ten BMWs to his ten different houses. That isn’t a judgement on whether somebody should own ten BMWs or ten houses, however, it is a judgement on living (or not living as it were) by your convictions.

Our leaders and potential leaders are all hopelessly self-interested but get through gauged on how ‘modern‘ they are. One term (or even less) as prime-minister of this country can earn an almost unpalatable amount of money, certainly enough to move away from the cess-pool of crime and poverty that you helped to maintain and maybe even encourage. They have become celebrities, photographed falling around drunk, newspaper headlines: LOCAL MP ADMITS ADDICTION TO COCAINE AND PROSTITUTES after which they shuffle quietly off to some quango wherein they research the actual need for quangos.

Krushchev noted that sending Nixon to a peace conference was like sending a goat to tend cabbages. Yet is this not true of all politicians at the very basic core of their role? We are electing self-interested people and expecting the same to look after an entire nation. Even then, maybe we as the public have encouraged this. Over the course of time we have increasingly hidden ourselves away from reality, so when a potential leader is on TV we don’t want him to say that youths must be drawn up to protect the village from wild predators, bandits and barbarians. We want him to say that everything will be great, everything will be free and we can just sit on the beach and drink diet coke. After a few terms of that, the aspartame will have rotted our brains so much we won’t notice that the guy was lying, or at least not care enough. Our criteria for choice seems to be whether he has a ‘good face for TV‘ or ‘just who did he vote for in Big Brother?’

The liars, degenerates and general misfits we call politicians (they put up a front of normalcy: couple of kids, wife, house in suburbs but sooner or later they’re all caught being spit-roasted by Puerto Rican rent-boys in ‘private clubs’) are only the symptoms. The problem is the system itself, it is geared to only attract these kinds of people. Anyone with sense generally avoids politics because it is fixed so that they cannot win, they will be slandered by their opponents, the media will call them Nazis and Fascists, which is a much worse label than some kind of closet-sodomite who enjoys the company of Puerto Rican boys (to suggest otherwise makes you a homophobe and at the least a far-right sympathiser).

So back to the conversation with the girl on the school bus, my very first answer would have been the best: not voting. That attitude will no doubt cause a nausea inducing cry of ’but all that it takes for evil triumph is for…’ and so on and so forth. Not casting a vote might be wasting a vote - however - casting a vote is wasting time. One party might put a penny more on income tax than another, or make empty promises to set a slightly more stringent immigration policy, but the important issues are where the mainstream parties never differ. They are self-interested, they are for the self interested and repeat the same tired ideas of equality, democracy, diversity and so on. Whether the leader of the country has a suit and tie and thinks marijuana smokers should be hung in public from their testicles or whether he bums around in jeans and a t-shirt, listens to…. I don’t know… Bon Jovi… (er..) and admits that when he was younger he once knew someone who knew someone who had a brother who smoked a cigarette that smelled ‘kinda funny and looking back, you know…’ makes no difference. Both men are, as William S. Burroughs noted “…rulers by accident, inept, frightened pilots at the controls of a vast machine they cannot understand, calling in experts to tell them which buttons to push.”