Voting for a Change?

Polling day ought to be a day of celebration. Complete with flags and bunting, brass bands and beer. 'Party' politics should mean just that. Tomorrow therefore ought to be an occasion when voters proudly step out to exercise the right of self-determination which past generations died to secure. Not the apologetic, furtive act that so many will be performing, if they can persuade themselves to do something so uncool, so unmarketised, so egalitarian as vote. So of what crime is it that they feel so ashamed?

Throughout the length and breadth of this septic isle, voters will be handing over their quality of life to be ripped to shreds by the London parties. The lie that there is no alternative to cuts has been repeated over and over by all three of the leading charlatans who have strutted their hour upon the screen. Though millions believe the lie, Britain is not ‘broke’; it is fact one of the richest societies in the world and its rich are getting richer by the day.

Lord Turner, Chairman of the Financial Services Authority, stated last year that much of what the banking sector does is “socially useless activity”. The voters, of course, will be the judge of that. And they will disagree. They will be telling the parties to cut – cut hospitals, cut schools, cut care for the elderly, just don’t cut bankers’ bonuses – because those are the priorities they truly want the parties to enact. Meanwhile, all three identikit leaders continue to support the waste of young lives in an unwinnable war of choice.

Voters in the Witney constituency have another option tomorrow. By voting Wessex Regionalist they can signal their dissent from the madness engulfing our world. In the coming months, when social unrest boils onto the streets, when perhaps the City of London itself is burning, when Brown, Cameron or Clegg goes down in history as the most hated prime minister ever, those who do will have the satisfaction of knowing that they did what they could to prevent it.

And having placed your ‘X for BEX’, why not then make your very own lapel badge to tell the world, ‘Don’t blame me – I voted Wessex’?