Every year, we commemorate those who fought for this country. On Remembrance Day and in the weeks before, we give thanks and respect for those who have ensured we remain free.
It is important to say that because whilst almost everyone I know strongly supports Remembrance. But not everyone remembers what people fought for.
Russell Brand is an alleged comedian. I don’t really find his type of humour funny, it’s not really my style. But he is smart, he is clever, he is influential. Next Thursday, he appears on the BBC Question Time show, alongside the BBC’s favourite politician and leader of the far right Ukip party, Nigel Farage. It’s not just the media that’s getting excited about the prospect of Brand and Farage swapping verbal blows on the telly and I confidently predict record viewing figures. Happily, I am going out for a few beers with an old friend so I shall miss a programme I never choose to watch anyway. I have come to dislike politics over the years. My mind has long been made up on how I vote because I vote for who and what I believe in, so listening to those two will just piss me off.
The one thing above all others that concerns me about Brand is that he tells people that it isn’t worth voting. Now the sort of people who are most likely to follow his advice are young people and, in all probability they will not be Tories. Farage must be rubbing his hands together at the prospect of young people not voting at all when they would never vote for the bunch of crackpots that he leads.
The result of the election is going to be hard to call. Tory and Labour membership figures are less than 2% of the electorate. They both have core votes but, just like in other parts of Europe, anti-politics is alive and kicking. It is quite possible that, with the Liberal Democrats being wiped out almost entirely (and don’t they deserve it?), Ukip will step into the breach. And Brand’s machinations may see Farage as Cameron’s deputy. Can you just imagine that?
Hopefully, that won’t happen but the message is surely this: you should vote. There is clear blue water between Labour and the parties of the right, of which the Lib Dems are now an integral part. There are slight differences between them but not so you would notice, as confirmed by Nick Clegg’s assertion that he was not only a co-author of Osborne’s full frontal attack on the working poor in his Autumn Statement, he was “proud” of it. One thing the Liberals are not these days is liberal. If you don’t believe me, look at their voting records.
But for god’s sake vote. People really didn’t fight and die for nothing and they certainly didn’t fight to see us squander their hard-gained sacrifices, often their lives for us to not bother to vote.
