Cynics are cynics because they still care. Apathy is a far more dangerous - apathy means people can get away with anything.

I just had an online discussion about who to vote for, because I'm really struggling. 

Tories

We have the old Tories - who lied to me back in the 1980's. I like their rhetoric, it's hard to argue with wanting to create a society with a proper safety net that encourages the able bodied to work. But their deeds were kick the poor because they can't complain. My grandfather was a civil servant back in the 1930's. He was a good Catholic and had 8 kids, the Tory government of the time cut his wages. Does this sound familiar? I couldn't vote for this and it's what they did as soon as they were elected.

(New) Labour

We have new Labour - but they seem to have dropped the new recently. Under Blair they went to war, when a very large majority of the electorate didn't think it was a good idea. We're still trying to sort out that mess but now the politicians want to run away from it and they stick their hands in the pockets and say it wasn't me. It was you, the political class, who went adventuring - it wasn't the rest of us, who have to pay for it - sometimes with our lives. The political class went and fought that war without the agreement of the population, and now they wonder why we don't vote. It was a slap in the face and proof that whatever passes for democracy in the UK is severely limited. In my tweet I called them the new liars.

One of the other things that frankly terrifies me is their fear of dissent from whatever is the liberal consensus du jour. They passed a lot of laws about hate speech and so on, trying to say that the state should be able to control what people say. This authoritarian streak, that starts from the premise that most of the electorate are children who need to be told what to think by an educated minority, has resulted in the biggest attack on our rights as subjects of her madj since the 1940's. Most of these laws aren't used much, but they're on the statute books now and they'll use them to shut people like me up. UKIP, for example, are trying to get their opponents locked up for calling them fascists by using these laws. Thanks, new Labour, for giving these buffoons a fig leaf to criminalise their opponents.

In the 1940's we were at war and under martial law. Not so much now.

We also had a period of economic growth that was truly amazing (and unsustainable, but never mind that now) and for once the government didn't have to borrow as much. They could have invested in our worn out infrastructure, and in things we desperately need like social housing. They're nominally socialist and are supposed to care about these kinds of things. But instead the revenues were used to grow the civil service and create non productive jobs. The first thing the Tories did was cut these jobs, if the money had been invested instead of whirled around the economy like some Ponzi scheme it might have actually made a sustainable long term difference when the music stopped. Instead it stopped, the children went looking for their musical chairs, and there were none. Sigh. The cynic in me also says that if you have one of these jobs you're more likely to vote Labour - and, of course, throwing money around to grow the civil service and create pseudo productive jobs is much easier than creating ones that have some long term value.

I think their leader Milliband is another managerial clone who will lean wherever the wind blows, just like Blair and Brown before him. I wish he had some principles I could actually see. I don't care about policies - they're always bullshit and depend on whatever situation people have when they arrive in office. But I really don't want another load of caring cuts.

Liberal Democrats

Then we have the Liberal Democrats. Who helped the Tories form the coalition government despite not (in theory) being particularly close ideological bedfellows. They made some promises about not upping (in fact abolishing?) student fees, introducing a fairer voting system and so on. Not kept any of these promises, but have kept the Tories in power. I think they're gonna take a real beating in the elections - and they deserve it. They also have their nanny state authoritarian streak too. They hadn't had a sniff of power in nearly 100 years, so I suppose I can't blame them for being spineless opportunists. 

Here's to the next 100 years, eh, Mr Clegg?

UKIP

The only other semi mainstream party is UKIP - who are dangerous ideologues with a populist agenda that resonates with a lot of fear and ignorance. Some people call them fascists, but they aren't, they are in fact incoherent. Which is what makes them so dangerous because they can be everything to everybody. I doubt they would use gas chambers on people they don't like because they haven't the wit to put the money in the meter.

People are scared and need to blame somebody. That's where UKIP come in. If you don't vote then they might win seats. That's where apathy gets you, ruled by a parliament of racist jingoistic weathercocks. So you have to vote against even if you don't know what for.

The greens

I find the middle class anti-technology thing frankly terrifying. We need more and better technology, not some faux Arts degree technophobe utopia where some tiny rump of humanity gets force fed cardboard and kelp products. The scary malthusian subtext is that they think there are too many people on the planet. Therefore, there needs to be less. Doesn't this worry you? Unless you're the one making the decisions of course. This sentiment is the dangerous one, the one you could call fascist if you were of a mind to do so, not some wooly headed chauvinists.

I don't disagree with not wanting waste. I do disagree with only using sticks instead of carrots to make things change for the better. I disagree very strongly with the anti human and ignorant anti-technology sentiments.  

You wanna go live in a freezing cold teepee and watch your kids die of pneumonia off you go. Don't drag me along.

The economy

The banks should have been allowed to fail. At the moment they can make each way bets and if it doesn't work we have to bail them out. WHY? Because they have money and can buy political influence. I've been very critical of Gordon Brown, but in fact he was dancing to the same tune as all of the other European chancellors - let's keep this Ponzi scheme running for as long as we can. If he'd tried to stop it he would have been replaced with someone else who did toe the line.  I still think he could have done something with the surplus he had other than buy unsustainable jobs.

We also don't need all of the cuts that have been happening - it's ideology not economics. Economics is 90% nonsense anyway, none of the predictions economists make come true because their models don't work. Yet we still let them make policy. 

Elections

All three main parties in the UK lost the election. All of them. Instead of seeing this as a wakeup call and maybe trying to start a national debate about the political process, perhaps starting with warmonger Blair being able to ignore our wishes and moving on from there, we've ended up with an unelected government of Tory millionaires who know nothing about how 99% of us live our lives.

But I cling to my cynicism, and I will vote - apathy is far too dangerous.