IdioC's Fifth Dimension

The last rant about junk mail and such proved to be at the worst time possible. The Divided Kingdom heads to the polls on the 6th May and so the dead rainforest that comes in through the letterbox is – judging by the volume at least – being bolstered with the forces of dead pot plants and anything that can be scrawled upon by man or printing firm. With what? Faces of prospective MPs mugs coming in through the letterbox and falling into one of several categories: a national leaflet with the local policies fecklessly mail-merged onto it in a different colour or font, a letter supposedly from the hand of the party leaders with your details unabatedly mail-merged into it with ID numbers around the address or – for the smaller parties – just a national leaflet. It remains to be said whether mail-merging by a printing firm is simply too expensive for them to handle or they realise that people are smart enough to deduce that the prime minister can’t spit out 45 million letters in a week by his own hand. In fact in the majority of cases, it remains to be seen who on earth the smaller parties actually are.

However, they need to get attention for their policies and that’s all well and good. Yet as disturbing as the gormless airbrushed grins, mock-up photo shoots and saccharine list of rhetorical promises (so-called for having the same answer as a rhetorical question) may be when you step through your own door, I often feel a small amount of sympathy for their financially well-backed plights in an intermission from my usual cynical opinion of politics, as I realise they’re all competing against the same insurmountable foe: takeaways. There might be three or four candidates for my government constituency but there are seven at last count for my choice of Chinese within a similar space. There might be several parties that want to be the main outpost for the region but I could pick between Indian, Chinese, Pizza, Fish and Chips, Kebab, Chicken or Burgers for the same. The politicians might make attractive-sounding promises, but the pizza and grill places give me money-off vouchers I can redeem straight away without waiting for a particular chain to get the majority or clashing with the local council over it. Well, assuming food standards aren’t onto them, of course. The real coup de grace for anyone thinking that all the politicians are essentially the same – an opinion I’ve often related to – is that most of the Chinese joints have the same clipart and array of dishes. There will have to be cuts, in this case pork and they will be Char Sui.

The electoral system is becoming as divisive as the policies; as much as I support proportional representation, I’m sure many people will relate to the situation of a large group of friends pooling together for a takeaway, only to have factions over what sort of food to get, in what will have been a proportionally representative show of hands. It’s not the magic ticket to democratic accountability some seem to think it is. After all, reducing the number of lost votes doesn’t magically make the politicians less prone to party whips over-riding their local promises, more accountable for conflicts of interest or less likely to stick their fingers into the coffers, like a 16-year-old in a pizza joint sticking a few extra toppings on for his friends.

So we’re stuck with the First Past The Pizza system for now. It’s simply a case of everyone having their own preference of chain or if they’re yet to find one that works for them, stumbling back from the pub on a Friday night. Whether people opt for the fewer slices with excessive government toppings Labour pizza, the scarcely-topped with more slices if you can afford them Tory pizza, the proportionally-representative but unknown-sized LibDem pizza, the smaller but Organically-sourced Green pizza, the no EU-ingredients UKIP pizza, the deep-fried SNP pizza or the lamb and caerphilly Plaid pizza with an partly-incomprehensible menu, we know whoever loses, the takeaways win.

And damn, am I suddenly hungry.