2010 UK General Election.

I suppose like many other voters, this year's forthcoming General Election has left me in a bit of a quandary. It is the first time in all the years I have casted my vote that I am unable to decide who to support. Ok, lets not kid ourselves, the outcome will be between Labour and the Conservatives. No matter how much the Lib Dems huff and puff, there is no way they will form a new government. The best they can hope for is a hung parliament and they are asked to back up either of the other two big boys. This is because our constitution does not allow for Proportional Representation (PR), which would give the Lib Dems a better chance of getting more of their MP's elected. The general public (I include myself) are still angry about the whole "MP expenses scandal" in which many of our elected members have been found with their "snouts in the trough". There has been a procession of MP's declaring that they will not stand at the election,  deciding it is better to go before they are thrown out by their constituents.

I think we will see the biggest election boycott in living memory, because the majority of people cannot see things getting any better whoever wins. This could leave the door open to extremist parties  getting a bigger foothold in the country. The trouble with extremist parties is they do not have any workable policies. They rely on lynch-mob  ideas where they tend to blame all the ills of the country on immigrants, saying they come over here and pinch all our jobs. What they don't say is, that a lot of the jobs taken are one's that no one wants to do because of the money offered.

I have come across a new group (pictured opposite)  called the "Jury Team", http://www.juryteam.org/. Launched in mid March 2009, the Jury Team they say "is for people who believe in democracy but who have seen how the current party political system has turned the United Kingdom's Parliament and Government into the creatures of a small and increasingly distant group of self-serving politicians". They also state, "The Jury Team will ensure that the electorate have the ultimate power and that Parliament and Government are both run for the benefit of the country and not for those who work in these organisations. We need to give back to people their pride in their country and its institutions and to let them become the ultimate jury". Strong sentiments and when you read their manifesto, their thirty proposals are worthy reading. I don't propose to copy them down on here, but recommend you go to their site and peruse them yourself. I think the big parties should take note and adopt some of the Jury Team's proposals, because to ignore them could come back to haunt them. At least they seem to take politics more seriously than some of the fringe parties, especially extremist ones.