And So It Starts…

So finally an election date has been announced. I’ll admit to a little mild surprise here as I fully expected Bottler Brown to find enough wriggle room to avoid calling it – after all, he does have the Civil Contingencies (2004) Act to fall back on and there have been examples of unrest that he could have used as an excuse. Maybe even he realised that they were too tenuous and invoking the act would have seen him ejected from power faster than one of Goldfinger’s thugs from an Aston Martin.

So, what now? Three weeks of interminable electioneering, as if we weren’t already bored to tears with it. For me, though, this time is different. I will not be voting. I can’t. As an expatriate, I can apply to vote in my old constituency. However, there are hoops to jump through. I downloaded the form and filled it in only to discover that our signatures have to be witnessed. So, not a problem. Well, yes, there is a problem. The witness must be another British expat. Now you would have thought the Mayor or someone of that ilk would do, but no, it must be a British passport holder and they must reside overseas. So, that’s that, then.

I have to say, I don’t feel any great sense of loss. If I were to vote, I would have been voting Tory. Not because I am enamoured with iDave and his brand of Labour lite policies, but because the Tories are the most likely to unseat the sitting Labour MP. He took the seat from the Tories in 1992 and they have been the second runners ever since. In the last local election for our ward, the Tories swept all of the Labour councillors from office. I suspect that the MP will experience his own Portillo moment on May 6^th.

But, is that a reason to vote? Voting against rather than for? I don’t know. And, frankly, I can no longer be bothered. A plague on all their houses. According to this, I should be voting UKIP anyway.