Pin the Tail on the Donkey

 With less than three days to go until the Council elections, I have to admit to being rather baffled.

I’ve searched the internet and scoured the local news websites but, for all intents and purposes, our independent candidate doesn’t exist. He’s named in the official lists, of course, but apart from that, there is nothing out there to indicate his policies and principles.

Since I, like many others, am thoroughly disgusted with party politics, his independent status should make him an appealing option, but what if he’s passionately committed to meat-free council catering or low traffic neighbourhoods? That appears to be the case for those independent candidates who, in the local paper’s cursory and county-wide rundown of party policies, banded together to explain how they aligned with the Greens on certain issues but, as our candidate wasn’t one of them, there’s no way of telling.

As for leaflets, we’ve had one from the Conservatives and two from the Lib Dems, all mainly telling us how the other parties have got it wrong (the Lib Dems, with a certain cavalier attitude to veracity, state that the requirement to show photo ID is “part of a Conservative government plan to make it harder for people to exercise their right to vote”). The local community magazine is no help - although it’s good to know that the WI are holding a coronation-themed cake sale on Friday - and the nearest thing I’ve found online is a supporters’ forum for the local football club which is trying, with limited success, to ascertain what each candidate thinks about their plans for a new stand.

It seems incredible that, in a nominal democracy, voting in local elections can be a matter of either blind party loyalty or selecting - apologies to the gentleman concerned - a pig in a poke. If our political masters really supported our right to choose those acting on our behalf, at the very least one would expect the Council website, along with the required details of the candidates’ proposers and agents, to include a short statement from each candidate enumerating his or her priorities and intentions; since they took the trouble to write and tell us we’d need photo ID to vote, they could even have printed the statements on the back of the letter.

With virtually no information on which to base the decision, it becomes a random choice on a par with a blindfold guessing game or a once-a-year-punter’s bet on the Grand National - except that there’s no big payout if you win and the horse won’t have a say in how local services are run for the next four years. Still, to be cynical, it probably won’t make much difference in the long run: as the world-weary Polish saying on elections has it, ‘Same trough, new pigs’.

Update: further digging in the Council archives has revealed that he stood (unsuccessfully) for election in a nearby local ward in 2016; he was representing UKIP then, so I’m guessing it’s a ‘no’ on the vegan dinners and the road-blocks.