Please make it stop!!!

Young children do this really irritating thing.  You are sitting having a coffee with your friend, and the toddlers insist on tugging at your sleeve until you look at the drawing they have just done.  Even though the alleged drawing is little more than random crayoning, you feel obliged to pat them on the head and blatantly lie to them… “Yes dear, it’s very good.”  (At the same time making a mental note that a career in the arts is probably a non-starter).

For about six months last year, it became apparent that modern politics is exactly the same.  Every morning one or other political nonentity would pop up to demand that you look at the latest policy announcement that they had hurriedly crayoned in the night before.  And the more they did it, the more irritated the rest of us got.  Being polite, we offered platitudes like “oh, that sounds very good” when what we should have said was “take your policy announcement and shove it where the sun don’t shine – I’m busy.”

The problem was not that politicians were making announcements (although it would have been nice if these could have been limited to the 6 weeks leading up to the election rather than the tedious 6 months that we were actually subjected to).  Rather it was that the announcements were no more informative than the crayoned scrawls that the average three-year-old might come up with.  What they amounted to was a diet of ill-informed fear mongering… “Don’t vote for them because they are secretly planning to murder every firstborn child in the land” or some such.

It seems a long time since politicians simply told us what they think needs doing, and what they propose doing about it.

It has begun again.  We can look forward to four tedious months of people we have never heard of, together with those we wish we had never heard of, telling us about how the world will be sucked into a black hole if we are foolish enough to take their opponents’ advice.  And the crayon drawings that we are being shown aren’t even as good as the ones three year old Tarquin and Chardonnay produce on a wet Saturday morning.

The problem is – and whatever your views on Europe, I think we can agree on this – as Yogi Bear once pointed out, “making predictions is really difficult; especially about the future.”  Remember that most of the people who are telling you which way you should vote in the EU referendum are the same people who were telling you to put your life savings into Icelandic banks or Spanish property back in 2007.  They are the same people who told you that there was nothing wrong with Northern Rock or Lehman Brothers.  They are the same people who told you that there was nothing wrong with the economy in 2008.  Now they are telling you that if you vote the wrong way, the UK economy will collapse into perpetual ruin and your democratic rights will be replaced with some form of neo-feudalism.

My point?  You are better off asking Mystic Meg which way you should vote than listening to any of these self-appointed fear-mongers.  Maybe we could just settle the whole thing using that Octopus they used for predicting the outcome of the football World Cup.