Do they not WANT me to vote for them?

We had local elections yesterday (lucky us) and being a good little democratic citizen I trotted off to the polling station, where I was surprised to discover that we did, after all, have a Lib Dem candidate and a Labour candidate.

Now, I'm a bit of a leftie. I don't really ally myself with any particular party, but I general fall somewhere between what Labour should stand for and what the Lib Dems stand for, with the caveat that they can say whatever they want cos they'll never actually get elected. I readily admit that the kinds of changes I am looking to see in the country are waaaay more radical than what any self-respecting candidate would be prepared to actually put in their campaign literature, but I'm pretty realistic and would be happy to be swayed by a convincing candidate of general leftie persuasion, especially in the local elections: in a general election, although you aren't really supposed to, I would tend to vote for a party and a Prime Minister, but in the local elections I would tend to vote for the candidate I felt most confident in. Overall, I generally believe that public services are in principle a good thing, I think we need to do A LOT more for the environment, I think the gap between the rich and the poor is too wide and I'd love to completely overhaul the education system. And I'd vote for anyone who promised more allotments.

So, I had been looking forward to all the candidates coming around and asking me what issues were on my mind so I could grill them about their ideas for making Wokingham a more sustainable, resilient and environmentally-friendly place, about how they would follow up on the suggestions Friends of the Earth (of which I am a member) gave them last month and if they would please stop concreting over everything and get rid of all the cars, please, if it isn't too much trouble, thank you. And can I have an allotment before 2015 please?

Now, I work from home and am usually in of an evening, so if anybody had come round canvassing, I would have known. We had leaflets shoved through the door by the Conservatives, UKIP and the BNP, but they ran away immediately afterwards and didn't want to talk to me. Labour and the Lib Dems didn't even bother to do that, let alone actually try and talk to me. It never even entered my mind to vote for UKIP or the BNP (despite the hilarious reply UKIP gave to an email I sent to various MEPs about biofuels), and I didn't really want to vote for the Tory candidate because a) his environmental policies were rubbish (basically: environmental issues begin and end with waste and recycling, and we couldn't ever have alternative weekly collections, never, never, never, never, NEVER, although had he come and asked me what I thought I'd have shown him my bokashi bin) and b) all the material we've ever had from him has contained a big whine about how little funding the Borough gets from central government compared to..... councils where there are lots of poor people. Now, there is a genuine issue about how basing it on averages means the worse off in overall richer areas are even worse off than they would be in poorer areas where there was more central funding, but do they talk about this? No, it's just 'poor us, aren't we hard done by?' never mind that that's how local government funding works or that the reason we don't get as much is because we're all well-off and don't need it - it's like saying, 'Oh, poor stockbrokers, they have to pay more tax than nurses and bin-men.'

So I didn't want to vote for him either.

And so since I knew nothing about the candidates representing the two parties I might have swung between or their policies, I was damned if I was going to vote for them.

So, ladies and gentlemen, since people died so that I could have the right to vote and I did not want to dishonour them by allowing apathy to win the day, I am ashamed to say that I spoilt my ballot. I voted for all the candidates and drew a silly face at the top of the paper for good measure.