Gordon Brown has finally called the next General Election, then. Obviously we all knew he was about to do it, and when he was going to do it, but it’s nice to have it all official.

We like official.

For those of you not in the know about the Prime Ministerial candidates, I thought I’d do a bit of a rundown of the big three. Although of course we don’t actually vote for Prime Minister, we vote for our local Members of Parliament, and then the Queen picks a PM from the winning side (usually, although she can pick one of the losers if she wants to).

Underpinnings of British politics aside, let’s pretend we get to decide who the PM is, and that it will be one of these three chaps below :

• David Cameron

The Conservative Party have gone to great lengths under Cameron to convince us that they aren’t really the same old gay-hating, xenophobic, top-hat-wearing Tories who caused the suicide and unemployment rates to triple during their last government.

They also keep announcing policies involving tax cuts for rich married people while sending single parents to work when their children are still in nappies.

Let’s not pretend that we don’t know what we’d be getting – if you’re rich and married, you’ll probably do fairly well under a Tory government. If you’re anything else, then they’ll fuck you over with a series of horrific spending cuts on vital services (like the NHS) and taxes increased on people who can least afford to pay them (like minimum wage-earners).

I also challenge anyone to look at a picture of David Cameron and see him as wearing anything other than a top hat.

Politics for Americans : The Tory Party are a bit like the Democrats, only more left wing.

• Nick Clegg

The Liberal Democrats or ‘the other party’ as they are commonly known, are not going to win. They’ll win a few seats from people who don’t like Labour but wouldn’t be seen dead voting Tory, but not enough to win an election.

Why? Because their policies are non-existent. In previous years, LibDem policies have been ridiculous, with the party leadership knowing that they can promise free bus rides to the Moon for under-5s without having to worry about budgeting for it, as they’ll never get in.

This year, however, the LibDem policy seems to be “Look how shit the Labour policies are. And the Tory ones are even worse! Vote for us instead”.

Also, they have a new campaign bus.

(I don’t really know anything about Nick Clegg, he’s a personality void when he’s on TV – although he does seem to get quite excited about things, I can’t seem to focus on any of his words – and they’re just going to change leader in a couple of months anyway, so I don’t see the point in getting attached to this one. Paddy Ashdown was the best; he could kill a man with his thumbs)

Politics for Americans : The Liberal Democrat Party are a bit like the Democrats, only more left wing.

• Gordon Brown

Gordon has the home field advantage at the moment, being as he’s the man currently in charge. Although, given that we’re British, that works out as more of a disadvantage – everything that is currently wrong with the country is probably his fault.

To be fair, Labour have been in power for the past four hundred (13) years, and they have fucked a few things up along the way. Like the NHS.

Oh, and they started a war two wars.

Gordon is also crap at public relations. He comes across as boring, dour and a generally miserable bastard. He’s also pretty effective at Prime Ministering, so I’ve never been too concerned that he can’t sell himself while he’s supposed to be doing his job.

Ultimately, it is always worth remembering that the Labour Party aren’t Tories, and aren’t – for example – talking about bringing bits of Section 28¹ back into law. Or using public money to drain their moats.

Politics for Americans : The Labour Party are a bit like the Democrats, only more left wing.

¹The “it’s basically illegal to be gay or gay-friendly” law that the Tories passed last time they were in power.
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So, who am I going to vote for? Well, if you’d been paying attention at the start you’d realise that it’s none of the above, as I’ll be voting on my local MP instead.

Probably not the Tory candidate…

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Posted by Dave in Politics (6/04/2010 at 15:50).
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