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Tuesday 5 May 2015

All my Ukip

You may follow me on Facebook or Twitter, in which case you probably already know that I really don't like UKIP. No, I tell a lie. I hate them. For all their claims and all the careful manicuring of their manifesto and public statements, I believe that they ARE a racist party, if only for the simple reason that no-one has ever voted for UKIP for a non-racist reason. The sad thing is, the majority of people who have done the deed don't even realise this, so insidious is the UKIP machine. Their sole reason for existence is to peddle fear, suspicion and intrigue. I think we need them out of British politics and out of Britain.

I have chosen to express this via the means of art and some interpretive dance, but the latter need not detain us further. I thought that I should collate all my UKIP themed artwork into one handy grab bag for your convenience.

This is the first Nigel Farage that I drew. Typically enough, I also think it is probably the best one.

Here is Nigel in the ascendant.

And here he is, fallen back to Earth as a scarecrow. Pretty scary.

Here is Nigel, after Francis Bacon's Study After Velázquez's Portrait of Pope Innocent X

And here is Nigel after The Scream by Edvard Münch

Ukip isn't all about Nigel, here he is with his two MPs, Douglas Carswell and Mark Reckless

Here's an election poster I made for them, free of charge

After the first TV debate I made Nigel be a frog

Which led me, naturally enough, to Toad of Toad Hall

After that, Nigel was a snail

But ultimately, we mustn't lose sight of the fact that Nigel is a person just like the rest of us.

Monday 4 May 2015

The continuing disenfranchisement of E. Carter (aged 35)

No-one cares who you are going to vote for. Or why.

So, here's who I am going to vote for and why. In 2010, as I had in 2001 and 2005, I voted for the Liberal Democrats. They seemed like a nice bunch. But, it turns out, they are not a nice bunch at all. Putting aside for one moment my dark suspicions that they have perhaps always been the Diet Conservatives, they have facilitated the worst government since the Khmer Rouge seized control of Cambodia in the 1970s.

I live in the safest of the safe Conservative seats. The last MP who did not represent the Tories that our constituency returned to Westminster was a fish who had not quite evolved the full capacity to live on dry land, back when the Earth was just a ball of molten rock hurtling through space shortly after the Big Bang. You could argue, then, that it doesn't matter who I voted for. But tell that to my conscience. One day British politics may change or, more likely, my address will and the Liberal Democrats will need my vote. They will never get it. Not in this lifetime.

So, to 2015. My political convictions have not changed in the last five years, although my understanding of political realities have taken something of a kicking. What I want above all other things is for a change of this wretched, awful government. Learning to love Ed Miliband has been the answer.

Ed Miliband: everyone should vote for this man or no-one should
Again, safest of safe Conservative seats. It doesn't particularly matter who I vote for on a local or national level, the way the British electoral system works. So it all boils down to conscience again. Last night I realised that I cannot, despite earnestly believing that I would until yesterday, vote for the Labour Party in 2015.

Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe Ed Miliband is like every other politician in the world, where expediency and the desire for power rather than principle is the sole guide to their actions. But his hard line denial and refusal to try and work with the SNP seems to me to suggest that he is willing to let the Conservatives get back in to Downing Street again based on nothing but principle and vainglorious pride.

This is not just the Conservatives bolstered by the stinking Liberal Democrats, either, but the Conservatives with help from the vile UKIP and venal Democratic Unionist Party. It would be the worst coalition since the one George W. Bush built to go and rain death on Iraq in 2003 and this time, the blood (hopefully only figuratively speaking) would be on Ed Miliband's hands.

I like Ed Miliband. I admire him. I think he would be a good Prime Minister and I hope that by this time next week he will have been given an opportunity to prove it. But above all, I would like to be able to vote for him and his party again in the future. If I vote Labour in 2015 and his intransigence leads to five more wretched years of Conservative government (and we really ain't seen NOTHING yet) then, after last time, it would be more than my conscience and I could possibly bear. So this is why I am going to be voting for the Green Party on Thursday morning.

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