It’s fashionable to say that abstention, or vote spoiling, sends a message to the politicians that you wish to vote None Of The Above, but all it really does is send a message that said politicians don’t need to care about what you think in order to get elected. It would be nice if they thought “Hey, there are millions of non-voters out there who could support me if I listened to them!”, but conscientious abstention is indistinguishable from apathetic or ignorant abstention (which are both much more popular). It’s fairly straightforward: if you don’t care about voting, politicians won’t care about you.

And so I couldn’t help notice that there’s a local election on the 3rd of May. The Conservative candidate actually came round to my house to personally canvas me. He was terribly polite and professional, but he really can’t win with a phrase like “Conservative Party Candidate” attached to his candidacy - the tories have become a complete non-entity in recent years. They’ve tried to switch political alignment from Evil to Stupid, but have retained a commitment to big government bureaucracy, EU rule, and headline chasing. There’s only so much of the bad stuff that local councillors can get up to compared to MPs, but the parties do use local election results as a barometer of public opinion, and sometimes as a mandate for continuing their dastardly schemes. If I voted for local Labour, it would be an endorsement of central Labour.

Not that Labour even have a candidate standing here.

So what are the alternatives? I looked up the list of candidates (in the web-equivalent of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying Beware of the Leopard) and perused them.

The Lib Dems are even worse than the Conservatives: rather than let their wishy-washiness prevent them from forming any solid policies, they’ve gone and formed wishy-washy policies. They do oppose ID cards, but not out of any principled opposition to gigantic government projects that carries across to their other policies.

There are two independent candidates standing, but I could find no information on them or their ideas whatsoever, apart from the fact that they both appear to be members of the local Residents’ Association. With no other information to go on, I’d have to guess that that’s a bad thing.

The one remaining candidate is from UKIP, a long-standing ultra-minor party most notable for being associated with madman Robert Kilroy-Silk. However, he did leave, and having had a look at the UKIP website, I find them refreshingly forthright. They oppose a European superstate, they oppose ID cards, they oppose centralisation, they promote a flat tax, they promote schools being run by headteachers instead of politicians, and they promote deregulation and free trade. They also oppose immigration, seemingly of any kind, and while that is wrong (people should be free to move about as they see fit), it’s arguably not so bad given that we’re not yet set up to accept free movement into and out of our society.

Ultimately, it’s clear that UKIP and the BNP are the only parties that actually believe in anything any more, and the BNP have thankfully joined Labour in not showing their filthy rotten guts around here.