Making Your Mind Up? - 11 April 2010

Making your mind up is not as easy as we may at first think. When we are younger we tend to know all the answers. When older we realise that we don't even know what the questions are. The first week of the 2010 has started and was greeted with the headlines "They're off". After this week we might agree, but rather with the interpretation of eggs which have passed their sell by date than the excitement of three more weeks of campaigning. It was interesting to hear Andrew Marr on his Sunday Show telling us about one candidate who was the sitting MP was taken ill for the whole of an election campaign and did no campaigning. He did not engage with one of his constituents and much to his delight his majority was increased! I say no more.

Well maybe I will. Why can't the politicians treat their constituents as adults with brains? Of course we know that massive savings much more than any of the parties are telling us at present are going to have to be made and tax is going to have to be increased. It is all very well telling us that the government is wasting our money and intend to reduce waste but not this year... so they will continue to waste it for another year... our money mind, not theirs! A tax on jobs does appear to be strange at a time when we are trying to preserve employment and get people back into work. Leaders of industry have rushed to support the policy to reduce some of its implementation but when the savings come to light it is as little as £3 per week or £150 per year. This does appear to be a small amount, but if you employ thousands of people in your company it really does add up at a time when other costs are rapidly being increased.

Supporting Families is important. But is this headline grabbing policy going to achieve it? Who does the leader of the Conservative party think he his by telling us what sort of family we should be in to be rewarded by the state. This policy could actually do more harm to the family than support it according to Ekklesia the Christian think tank, an organisation one would have thought would give the policy its support. But a reality check reveals that we are only talking about £150 per year. This simply tells us that politicians are living in a different world from the rest of us. There are much better ways of support families.

Smaller parties can of course promise what they like as according to the polls they have no chance of sitting in government. They may of course influence it if we end up with a hung Parliament. According to the Independent on Sunday 8 out of 9 pollsters have the Conservatives to win an outright majority. pollsters of course have been wrong in the past.

We are told that Front Line Services will be protected. What on earth does this mean? Front line Services will of course be effected by those who support those in front line. They will have to be reduced and taxes will have to rise if we are going to tackle the debt. The answer is not to increase those working in the public sector if they are going to be made redundant in a years time.

So let's have some more honesty in this campaign please because if we don't get it we may all be tempted not to bother to make up our minds and switch off.