My last post was about Religion and the title was ‘Don’t talk about Politics or Religion’. I’m going to talk about Politics today but not in the way you’d think, of course. I was spending some time with the general public recently and started to despair a bit. We all know that Politicians are bastards and liars and so on. Everyone you speak to will tell you so. I do know an honest decent politician so I know they aren’t all arseholes, just most of them. However we do need them to run the country, some poor bugger has to do it. Unfortunately that means we have to endorse someone to be in charge of things and to do that we need to vote in elections.  We could always just have a dictatorship with me in charge but I am generally quite lazy so nothing would get done. In Britain we live in a democracy which means the general public get to choose their leaders every few years, this is where it goes pear-shaped as far as I am concerned.

There is no quality control on those who get to vote. Everyone over the age of 18 gets to choose who is in charge but in my view, not everyone should be allowed to. There should be some sort of questionnaire you need to complete for your decision-making to be evaluated. If you have a history of poor decision-making about fundamental simple things you should have no right at all to get to cast an opinion that counts on who you would like to be the Government of a whole country. Let me give you some examples.  If you go to a country show and you leave your dog locked in a hot car, or you go to a smart function in a bright yellow dress and purple shoes. If you aspire to emulate Kim Kardashian or you walk about town centres dressed in track suit pants halfway down your bum, vest and large gold chains. If you think it’s ok to have 5 kids by 5 fathers you don’t know the names of, or are a young lady with arse antlers and even though you are a big fat lump you choose to wear a crop top and hipsters. If you work in a bank but wear makeup like Cleopatra or you ‘pimp’ your cheap rubbish car with ridiculous accessories including a go-louder exhaust pipe. If you send in job applications from an email address like hotspunk69@hotmail or you hurl abuse for fun at the foreigners preparing food for you at 3 am. If you spend all your benefits on cigarettes and vodka and send your kids to school with a bag of crisps for lunch, or you go on holiday abroad and sling off at the culture of the country you are visiting as being ‘too foreign’. If any or all of the above apply to you, then you shouldn’t get to vote in elections.

These people demonstrate an appalling lack of judgement on a daily basis, why on earth should they have any say in who governs the country we live in. The things that are important to them are instant gratification, consumer excess and the lowest common denominator. I absolutely fail to see how they should get to have any sort of option to elect anyone into power. If they want to have the right to vote, let them vote in the X-Factor and celebrity big brother. There are hundreds of thousands of people who decided to vote Liberal in the last election because Nick Clegg came across as a decent reasonable bloke on the TV debates. Those people would have no idea then or now what the Liberals actually stand for or what their policies are.

The Conservatives struggle to make any head way in the polls because people who live in the North of England despise the Tories. They have been taught to despise the Tories since they were born, by their parents who worked in mines and despised the toffs from the south. This is a ridiculous state of affairs which does not have any visible end.  But neither the Northerners nor the toffs from the south can see past the history handed down by their parents. It is the same state of affairs as Northern Ireland sectarian hatred, but political instead of religious so less vicious.

So I think we need a change in the law and at election time you have to complete a sort of census/questionnaire so your eligibility to vote to be decided by an independent arbiter.  If you can show a history of learning lessons and trying to do the right thing by making good decisions, you get to vote on things that matter to everyone. If though you show that you are barely evolved from pond life and demonstrate on a daily basis that you stick two fingers up to society, taste, and civilisation, your voting rights are limited to reality television. Fair enough? I think so.