TWO ELECTIONS IN A WEEK should be seen as something similar to walking down one of those long passages in the underground railway full of irritating buskers singing old Joan Baez or Bob Dylan songs and expecting us to throw money into their battered guitar cases so they can go off and buy drugs for themselves and food for their foul-smelling dogs. We all know they shouldn’t be bothering us and we are sure that they really should be working for a living, and yet we are divided into those who give them a shilling or two because they feel self-conscious, those who ignore them and walk past, those who bizarrely actually think they sound nice and those who sometimes have too much to drink and start shouting at them or threaten to call the police. I will leave it up to readers to work out which of these I am.
BUT ONE SHOULD NOT CONFUSE the local elections with the European ones. In local elections people more or less know who the candidates are, because these are the haunts of the retired tweed-attired colonels, who rabbit on about returning to the good old days with traditional values, when one could take one’s secretary over one’s knee without getting hauled up before some sexual discrimination court, and the Woodbine-smoking anorak-wearing lefties who want the local power station closed down so we can all go back to using candles and be plunged into darkness and sub-zero temperatures for most of the winter while we watch our vegetables stewing over peat fires.
BUT ONE SHOULD NOT CONFUSE the local elections with the European ones. In local elections people more or less know who the candidates are, because these are the haunts of the retired tweed-attired colonels, who rabbit on about returning to the good old days with traditional values, when one could take one’s secretary over one’s knee without getting hauled up before some sexual discrimination court, and the Woodbine-smoking anorak-wearing lefties who want the local power station closed down so we can all go back to using candles and be plunged into darkness and sub-zero temperatures for most of the winter while we watch our vegetables stewing over peat fires.
BUT THE EUROPEAN ISSUE IS ENTIRELY NEW to most Britons, hardly any of whom have actually voted in this charade over the last twenty years, and most of whom never will. The usual suspects never line up for these elections, with the right wing being too suspicious of foreigners to want to have to sit next to them for long periods of time and listen to their unintelligible gibberish, and the Woodbine brigade too afraid to be very far away from a betting shop for too long. Thus we are left with nondescript men in grey suits – suited perfectly for what they will have in their hands in Brussels.
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