For the past couple of months, I have been writing sporadically into a Word document. It's kinda like a collection of short blog pieces, mostly commenting on news stories, with some liberal sprinklings of my personal, sometimes entirely unrelated and tangential, thoughts. But I've decided, what the hell. I'm going to (try and) write some semi-regular pieces covering, broadly speaking, the next British general election. It's been announced now, so there's no bullshitting about whether it's gonna happen or not.

I've already seen evidence of just how fractured this next general election is likely to be. Of course, for an average member of the public like me, there's certainly no given when it comes to how the political landscape will turn out - after all, the likes of me don't have immediate access to large-scale public polls, hearing only what the pollsters want us to hear - but it's looking like this election will be the most fractured I've known in my quite short life. I haven't been a voter for more than 4 years, and I didn't really have any interest in news in general, let alone politics specifically, until i was about 14 or 15, barring enjoyment of Spitting Image a few years before that (although of course I didn't understand many of the best bits) I have already felt the creep of voter apathy wind its icy touch around me. I see and hear and read about politicians in the news rather alot, but all they seem to be doing is looking after themselves, or plain ignoring the general public. I'm under no illusion that all of my views are exactly the same as those of most people, but neither are they all minority views. There's also this thing called "common sense," a little abstract as far as ideas ago, nevertheless there are some elements of "common sense" that are hard to deny, but which politicians still seem keen to ignore.
Not to mention, the current government's seeming determination to use as much public money as possible to profit a select few private companies. They even seem to be keen on rewarding just a few private companies with PPP and PFI contracts over and over, even when those same private companies consistently end up incurring far more costs on the government than would have been incurred without the advent of PFI/PPP. Of course, the rich guys who get richer as a result of all this, don't give a monkey's. They're in it for the money, and they don't care about anything else. And why should they? they probably pay premium rates to one or more of our big accountancy firms to find more and more ingenious ways to avoid paying tax, to such an extent that (even after taking these fees into account) they pay less tax than the average British worker earning ~£20000.