Voters Of Oldham East and Saddleworth-What A Shower!

Oldham voters head for the polling stations.

Having spent most of the day driving around the North West listening to the radio I was slowly boiling, actually more of a simmer really, at the result of the by-election in Oldham.

A Labour MP, Woolas, was forced out of office by an Elections Court for lying. The former Labour MP for nearby Bury, David Chaytor, has just been sentenced for fraud and fatboy slug Eric Illsley, Labour MP for Barnsley Central, is awaiting sentence for fraud. So the bloody misfits in Oldham vote to replace a lying Labour MP with another Labour MP.

That's without mentioning what the bastard Labour Party did to this country over the 13 years it was in power. Are the people of Delph, Uppermill, Glodwick, Denshaw and those other old Pennine mill towns really as inbred as we Mancunians like to accuse them of? Until yesterday that accusation was done largely in jest but, after yesterday, surely there may have to be a rethink about whether it is tongue in cheek or not.

Then I heard a silly old bag interviewed on regional TV news and she proudly proclaimed that of course she had voted Labour yesterday, working class people do vote Labour! For crying out loud, it's 2011. Except around Saddleworth where it still seems to be 1911. She then complained that the price of clogs had gone up a farthing and they couldn't afford to eat black pudding since it had gone up to a shilling a pound. When asked about Afghanistan she reckoned we should send Kitchener, he'd sort 'em out

I don't want some class commissar bossing me about, and Labour loves bossing people about, so here's one 'working class lad' who has never voted Labour. As a consequence I don't have Iraq and Afghanistan on my conscience like all those pillocks who have voted Labour since 1997. Or Kosovo and the shambles that followed on from that. Nor am I responsible for terrorists like McGuiness and Adams and their other IRA chums being in government in Belfast. Nor do I have surrender to the EU on my conscience or the selling off of the UK gold reserves just before the value of gold started soaring. I could go on but I won't because I'm bloody angry.

I know that four out of five voters did not vote for the Labour wallah. Only around 20% of those eligible to vote actually voted Labour, so 80% of the electorate weren't quite that stupid. But what of the 52% of the electorate who couldn't get off their fat, lazy backsides to put a cross on a ballot paper? Evidently that is too much for them to manage either physically, mentally or both. After all there were ten, yes ten candidates to choose from, too much for many of the voters tiny brains to cope with it seems. But don't whinge about there being nobody to vote for when you are next challenged about your absurd level of not-giving-a-shitidness!

I don't agree with compulsory voting, I don't see forcing people to vote as being very democratic. But 52% of the voters yesterday did not abstain, they just didn't give a shit. That is the threat to democracy, the apathy of the electorate, bread and circuses call it what you will.

In the words of The Jam:

And the public gets what the public wants
But I want nothing this society's got -
I'm going underground, going underground
 
I'm not really planning going underground, but after more than 30 years leafletting, canvassing, standing for election in local and parliamentary elections, and winning once, I do wonder why any of us who are politically active actually bother. It's easier to raise the dead than wake up the voters of this sinking nation. Or should that be 'stinking nation'?