Reasons To Abstain.

When Rishi Sunak stepped out into Downing Street last week and strode forcefully up to the lectern to announce a date for his impending redundancy he had clearly given it a lot of thought. He had written a lovely speech, full of power and persuasion, which craftily skipped past his recent track record and instead tried to get us all misty-eyed about the bottomless blank cheque he wrote for the nation at the start of lockdown. The purpose, I assume, was to remind us all of what a good egg he is and how much he loves Britain and that there is at least one thing to recommend him come the 4th of July, but what it didn’t take into account is that he hasn’t really done much else that’s been useful since 2020, and that leaves a pretty substantial hole in his CV. Still, he came out anyway (not like that – though he might want to consider pretending to come out as it could even bag him a few extra votes) and stood in the pissing rain as some die-hard leftie pumped out ‘Things Can Only Get Better’ in the near distance. It wasn’t a great start to an election campaign, but I have a sneaking suspicion there is a lot worse to come.

So, based on the safe assumption that every time I let the media into my life for the next six weeks I’ll be relentlessly carpet-bombed by election news and that the only reason I haven’t yet decided who to vote for is because there isn’t anybody I want to vote for, here are a few things that I really could do without.

1. People have to stop talking about what Rishi Sunak wears. There is an assumption that because Sunak wears expensive clothes he is out of touch with the common man, but to be honest if I had his money I would wear expensive clothes too, because why wouldn’t you? If he turned up dressed like a plumber or sweating bullets underneath a Primark onesie then that would be much more of a disappointment and some would start to ask if he was starting to take the piss. We know Rishi Sunak is rich and doesn’t need to do all this Prime Minister shit, so why not just let him get on with cocking it all up wearing whatever he wants? Whatever he wants, provided it isn’t Adidas Sambas. Or Adidas Gazelles. Or Adidas anything. Good Adidas classics are not meant to be worn by politicians, they are meant to be worn by people like Keith Richards and members of The Stone Roses. Don’t get out of your depth, Rishi; you’re too short to be taking that gamble.
2. Sir Kier Rodney Starmer needs to stop talking about his childhood. There is only so much of anyone’s childhood that one can comfortably stomach on a day-to-day basis and I’m afraid Starmy reached his output limit quite some time ago. As we all know he uses his caring, reliable, impeccably tedious, working class upbringing to remind us that he is caring, reliable, impeccably tedious and, most importantly, working class. He does this to lure in any working class voters that might be passing by, the clever little pup, but he talks about his upbringing as if he were describing a particularly uninspiring section of dry stone walling and so his message is lost as casual listeners slip in and out of what feels like a very concentrated bout of long covid. He may well have come from a humble working class background but to the untrained eye Sir Kier Rodney Starmer comes across as about as working class as the ghost of Tara Palmer Tomkinson, and even the most stupid voter in Britain (there’s a short list of just under 17 million) surely shouldn’t be stupid enough not to realise that. Why am I wasting my time explaining all this? He’s not working class!
3. No gimmicks. I can’t bear to watch politicians doing things they have never done before, and with good reason, suddenly agreeing to appear on the six o’clock news acting like, well, retards, who have found some else’s stash of coke and taken it a bit too far. I’ve already see Sir Ed Davey try his hand a paddle boarding and he looked about as steady on his feet as James Caan in Misery. In short, it was a pitiful display from a man well past even the memory of his athletic best trying to appeal to ‘the youth’, and it will only multiply as ravenous, wild-eyed MPs do all kinds of demeaning things on the advice of staff that really should know better. Before you know it, as a vote winning stunt, someone will be having their pubic hairs waxed off by Josie Gibson on This Morning or will be attempting to capture the gang culture vote by posing with their young children in a Hackney sink estate, each sporting a zombie knife and an uneasy smile. Note that in every case such antics will succeed in winning over not a single extra vote and footage will be hauled out for the purposes of extended humiliation for at least the next three general elections.
4. Terrible coverage. With Huw Edwards permanently out of the picture we will have to settle for a new force of irritating, namely Clive Myrie, who will somehow find a way to be somewhere on television at all times, 24/7. As if he isn’t bad enough we’ll be treated to near asthmatic levels of breathless hyperbole and over-stir from Chris Mason at the BBC and Robert Peston at ITV as they greedily masticate over every tiny morsel of irrelevance in an effort to unlock the next move in a game they like to think of as political chess but in fact is more like political paper-scissors-stone. Their sense of self-importance will grow like tropical fungi and eventually they will, one by one, go quite insane, fuelled with the belief that they are somehow more important than the story they are reporting.
5. Old hands. I don’t want to see a load of battered old politicians trying to tell me how politics works and how I should be thinking or what they would have done if they had been running for election, especially given that they were quietly removed from office 24 years ago for walking into a children’s playground with no clothes on. I don’t need Michael Heseltine’s eyebrows in my life anymore and I have no use for any angle from or on Theresa May. Blair and Brown are of no use to me and I have to pinch myself when I see David Cameron, just to remind myself he’s a member of the cabinet. To complicate matters further you have all this fuss over Diane Abbott. I appreciate that you have to respect the first black female MP for being the first black female MP but it’s a little harder to be overwhelmed with this achievement when it turns out that Britain’s first black female MP also happens to be a blithering tit who can’t help putting her clunky feet right in the molten core of whatever steaming mishap pie has been set in front of her. And I’m not even talking about the time she had sex with Jeremy Corbyn.
6. Brave new policies. You would think that a general election would be an ideal time to announce some radical new ideas which will capture the nation’s interest and galvanize the population to take our great nation to even greater heights. But it’s not. Coming up with a ‘great’ idea just before the polls open merely emphasises the bleak fact that you have come up with nothing worth talking about for months and that this is the last roll of a sticky die, spun by a hand that is simultaneously clutching at straws. Sir Keir wants to give the vote to 16 year olds, but this would prove disastrous (see below) and Rishi wants to introduce a new variation on National Service, which is far too little, much too late and would be a logistical nightmare that would melt all the Downing Street computers. Call a general election and all of a sudden every political bigwig wants to save the planet and ban the concept of sewage and renationalise prostitution and give free blankets to tramps. But it will never happen, not least because none of them have any genuine interest in doing something useful for anyone other than themselves.
7. Young people with opinions. Young people know nothing. They think they do, but that’s all they actually know, that they thing that they know, which isn’t the same as knowing at all. There are few events sadder during election fever that watching a news reporter interview a group of GCSE students about their thoughts on VAT or talking to a table of twats (one will be wearing a Chairman Mao hat, one will be very angry about something to do with student loans and several others will be confused about their gender) in a greasy student union bar about how much better off we’d all be if we read more Chomsky and banned all forms of transportation except oxen. Rather than extend the vote to 16 year olds we should be restricting it to anyone between the age of 25 and 70 (see below, again) who has a job which involves leaving the house at least twice a week and who hasn’t been visiting the doctor since 1998 on account of their anxiety. I’d qualify, but it doesn’t mean I’d be arsed.
8. Old people with opinions. Once they’ve finished at the students union our intrepid press representative will be sent out to interview an old woman outside a post office somewhere near Port Talbot. I don’t want to see this interview because this woman will have had the same toaster for the last 43 years, will suddenly break out into an anecdote regarding the blitz and will show flashes of a deep seated racism that no amount of exposure to liberal democracy is ever going to fix. Alternatively they will interview a leathery old bugger who just happens to be enjoying a Morris dancing routine outside his local pub and believes that it is simply ‘outrageous’ that we are an Anglo Saxon country with an Asian Prime Minister and that women and homosexuals still have the vote. He will think that young people just don’t know they’re born and will remind us all about the sacrifices he didn’t make in the war because he was born in 1948.
9. The debates. The first debate is in a few days time, on ITV at 9 o’clock in the evening, an event many people will miss because they keep getting told they have to get eight solid hours sleep a night if they want to reach their 50th birthday. This debate and all the debates that follow will be extended exercises in having a bush and then beating around it until the bush gets fed up and orders a taxi. The heated to and fro will do little other than highlight the glaring deficiencies of all involved: on personality, belief and agenda, and at some point it will turn into a playground pantomime with one side ultimately going so low as to accuse the other of being unable to spell simple words and of having a mum that smells funny. Throw into this an audience seething with disgust at one or more candidate and relishing the chance to have their 20 seconds of fame with a question designed to elicit the daftest and most predictably insincere response imaginable.
10. Scotland & friends. Every other day or so the new Scottish first minister (I know what he looks like but the name just isn’t sticking) will try to convince us, or rather himself, that the cauldron of Scottish politics could have a huge impact on this election. We’ll probably get something similar by way of an empty threat from Plaid Cymru, suggesting that victory for them could really unsettle the balance of power in Westminster, but in our heart of hearts we’ll all know that what happens in Scotland and Wales will have about as much chance of turning the tide in the House of Commons as the results of a baking competition on the Falkland Islands.

I just don’t know why they bother wasting their breath, but then you could say the same about anyone saying anything in the run up to this election. People have views but none of them matter. This election wants to mean everything but it doesn’t mean anything at all; it is just another distraction from the slow motion disintegration of civilisation and the fact that we’re not getting a summer this year. I’d sooner see Sunak and Starmer slug it out over 12 rounds – it would be cheaper, quicker and somehow the dullest fun you’ll see all year. I wouldn’t mind seeing Nigel Farage being fed to some hungry pigs either – but that would risk making this election all worthwhile.

G B Burton. 31.05.2024