Just five full days to go now for us all to decide how to vote. Almost half of us still haven’t fully made up our minds, polls suggest. An abnormally high number for this late in the campaign — and I’m one of them.
I’m a floating voter. I’ve never held a party allegiance, but chop and change for who I think is best for the country at the time. Ten million of us do the same, and I’ve done it diligently in every general election since 1992.
This time though, I just cannot work it out. And I’m in agony here.
My tortured deliberations keep leading me back to a little-remembered Nineties film I loved called Crazy People (strapline: “You have to be a little nuts to tell the truth”).
Dudley Moore plays a burnt-out New York advertising executive. After a nervous breakdown, he checks into a psychiatric hospital, where he shares his woes about the duplicity of his industry with his fellow patients.
Their response to him is novel: why don’t you just tell Americans the truth about what you’re selling? His new friends get to work and come up with their own bluntly honest ad slogans. “Volvo — they’re boxy but they’re good”. Or, “Forget Paris, the French can be annoying. Come to Greece, we’re nicer.”
Enthused, Dudley submits them. And guess what, to everyone’s astonishment the truth proves wildly popular. That’s the nub of this election campaign for me. I’m craving some unbridled honesty.
This is the actual truth: Britain’s in a bit of a mess. Not terminal, and it won’t last forever, but a mess it is.
We all know it. We see it in front of our eyes daily. In the potholes we drive over that never get fixed, in the eternal wait to get your child a GP appointment, in our monthly rent and mortgage demands.
Thanks to a series of crises, plus a serial habit by successive governments of kicking big problems down the road, Britain is broke as well as broken. We pay a record amount of tax for public services that are collapsing under the pressure of spiralling need, and the problems that used to be big are now seismic.
But by God you wouldn’t know it if you’ve listened to the political parties over the past five weeks.
You’ll have your own list, but here’s what I (foolishly) hoped the election would be about.
How do we go green without it bankrupting the lot of us? How do we afford to get rid of our gas boilers, our petrol and diesel cars? Climate change is kind of a big deal, but how many times have you heard it spoken about in this campaign.
How do we defend our continent against an ever more aggressive Russia aligned with a nationalist China? The world is getting really scary. The generals tell us we’re at another 1937 moment, so what’s the plan?
How are we going to finally build enough houses to keep up with our population growth? We’ve failed to since the Sixties and we’re now 4.5 million homes short, hence why prices have soared.
And how could so little have been said about the demographics time bomb now exploding. The crisis in social care is already acute, so how do we look after six million more people in their eighties when their number doubles soon?
All of my list are difficult, yours will be too. But none are beyond the wits of our inventive country. They need fresh ideas and brave reforms. Inevitably there will be some losers for the greater good, and all of us may have to get used to doing things differently, like paying new insurance premiums.
You know what though? We get that. None of us are expecting a bed of roses any time soon.
What has happened instead is party leaders have done their all to avoid seriously addressing any of them. When repeatedly asked, they obfuscate, they ignore, they patronise and they waffle. They divert us to obsess over D-Day bunks, confected tax rows and election bets. It’s been the worst general election campaign I can remember, and still the idiotic dance goes on.
Why don’t politicians engage in the truth with us? It’s a dishonesty based on a fundamental undervaluation of the electorate. We’re too stupid to deal with reality
Why don’t they engage in the truth with us?
It’s a dishonesty based on a fundamental undervaluation of the electorate. We’re too stupid to deal with reality, and if they try to tell us about it we’ll vote for the other bloke. We can’t handle the truth, to quote another Nineties US movie.
Today’s party leaders believe that because they are poor leaders and lack confidence in their own abilities. Instead they rely on a long-broken style of politics that is over-mechanised and obsessed with focus groups and polling. A style that panders to the lowest common denominator and kills the crucial political art of persuasion stone dead.
Most unforgivable of all, today’s crop have utterly failed to learn the biggest lesson of global politics in the last decade: voters everywhere are yearning for authenticity.
So who will I vote for then? I could just try to plump for the least worst option in the ugly baby contest. But if I did that, my vote will feel inadequate and I will feel ever more unheard, so I refuse to.
It’s tempting to vote for Count Binface. I like his policy of freezing the price of 99 Flake ice creams at 99p. Unfortunately, he’s only standing against Rishi Sunak and I don’t live in North Yorkshire.
What I’d most like to do is vote for None of the Above, to publicly register my dissatisfaction with the lot of them. But I can’t do that because None of the Above isn’t on the ballot paper. In the United States it is, because you can write in the name of whoever you want and it must be counted.
Just imagine how many of us would vote “None of the Above” this time round if we could. Hundreds of thousands? Millions? And if we did, what a powerful instruction that would send to Westminster that politics simply must be done differently.
What I can still do is the next best thing. I can spoil my ballot by writing None of the Above on it anyway. Sure, it will only be seen by one or two tellers, but all spoilt ballots must be counted and added to a column of their own, and their number read out by every returning officer.
So that’s how I’m voting. Call me one of the crazy people, but my real opinion will be heard on Thursday. And at least it’s honest.
