Saturday 15th November

The weather is dismal, rain wind and cold, real Autumn weather you could say.  The reason is that there is a whopping great depression sitting over the British Isles.  Sometimes it shifts slightly to the left, just west of Ireland, and sometimes drifts back and out to the North Sea.  There it has sat for a week or so, and shows no sign of going anywhere fast.  There have been a series of cold and wet fronts and tightly bunched isobars swirling in an anti-clockwise direction.  And here we sit, being buffeted about and cold and wet wherever we go.  And with the weather we all know there isn’t much you can do about it, we just have to put up with it.

And so too a Political depression has also settled over the country.  As expected the polls have narrowed, as they always do before an election.  The Tories in some polls are ahead of Labour but actually both are polling disastrously.  Ukip is taken around 15% of the votes.  There has been a history of slowly declining support for both major parties over the last twenty years or so.  The Tories have never recovered the votes they got under Thatcher or John Major, and likewise Labour is floundering well below figures that Tony Blair took for granted.  There is a major disillusion with Politics in general.  The expenses scandal and uninspiring leadership has meant that many people do not even bother to vote at all.  And UKIP, with it’s populist message has scooped up this vote.  But even die-hard Tories and Socialists are struggling to bring themselves to vote for Cameron or Milliband.   In some ways we should maybe welcome new parties, the SNP, the Greens and all, but in another way it means that very few of the public will get a Government that looks anything like what they voted for.  Almost all predictions are now pointless, as no-one quite knows how UKIP will fare at the General Election, or indeed how Tory, Labour and Lib-Dem voters will eventually place their crosses.  In the meantime we just have to put up with it.  Come May there will be a new Government and at least two party leaders now may well be relieved of their duties, whether the skies will appear any clearer though is anyone’s bet.