The Examined Life

Say whatever you like about democracy, but it’s still the best system that man, or woman has managed to think up of so far for delegating power and structuring his, or her society. Democracy is so great that this will be the third time in two years that the people of the U.K will have been asked to go to the polls and enjoy the thrill of democracy, proving that you can never have too much of a good thing

If last year’s E.U referendum is anything to go by then anything is possible in the forthcoming election. When Theresa May called for a snap election, ignoring the Fixed-term Parliaments Act that her own party brought into effect just 6 years prior, the polls gave her Conservative party a 22 point lead. Now that she’s been out meeting the public she’s been able to reduce that lead to single figures. YouGov’s latest poll has the Tory lead at just four points over Labour, as at 5 June. It’s been a somewhat fragmented election campaign owing to a handful of murderous bastards perpetrating acts of extreme violence in the name of a morally bankrupt ideology. If these maniacs hadn’t forced suspensions to the campaigning, it’s reasonable to assume that the more the public would have seen of  Theresa May the more appealing Jeremy Corbyn would have become and maybe the Labour party would even be ahead in the polls.

The parallels between Theresa May and Hilary Clinton are obvious. It’s like watching two people in quicksand, the more they struggle the more they get consumed. The more they talk the better their opponent seems to do. In the near future, if anyone has any sense, political candidates will just say nothing throughout their campaigns, a strategy adopted by Blackadder when he put forward Baldrick to run in a by-election:

So with Theresa May projecting all the charm of toxic waste seeping into an orphanage, this raises Jeremy Corbyn’s profile, without him actually having to do anything. When Corbyn does speak, he sounds like a 1970’s politics student who only got as far as reading Marx’s Das Kapital. I’ve got nothing wrong with Marxism per se, it’s just that I’m not sure how viable it is to the complex economies that we have today. Corbyn is also very open minded towards the ideology of terrorists, I have a hard time validating this stance towards terrorism in light of recent events. But whatever Corbyn might think or say is of little consequence, Corbyn’s most electable quality is that he’s not Theresa May.

Essentially, on Thursday the people of the United Kingdom have to chose between Jeremy Corbyn, a man who looks like he would be more comfortable pottering around an allotment, or Theresa May, a woman who we can’t trust to sit the right way round on a toilet.

A friend of mine made the following analogy of this Thursday’s election:

 … so we are faced with a choice that is similar to being asked to move a dog turd. You can either pick it up with your bare hands and take to the bin, or pick it up with your bare hands and put it in your pocket.

Crude as though the dog turd analogy might be, I consider it to be fairly accurate one. The British electorate is once again being asked to choose between the lesser of two evils: 

There can be little doubt that this general election pits two of the blandest party leaders against one another, offering the electorate a choice of either grey or beige. But, if our democracy can be so easily reduced to turd analogies and choosing between two evils, then I’m left to wonder if the terrorists haven’t already won.

 

While we should consider elections to be meaningful and terrorism to be a very real

 

threat, I was saddened to hear of the death of Peter Sallis. Sallis starred in the BBC’s Last of the Summer Wine for 37 years, and provided the voice of Wallace in the multi award winning Wallace and Gromit animations. As a child I spent many a Sunday having tea and sandwiches, whilst watching Last of the Summer Wine, which was essentially three old men wandering aimlessly around the verdant Yorkshire Dales accompanied by a hauntingly beautiful theme tune. Now that’s something a jihadist will never understand. In fact that’s what I recommend for radicalised extremists, they should be forced to watch all 37 years of Last of the Summer Wine, can there be a surer way of curing a person of homicidal ambitions?