rammi.glomp.me

// November 12th, 2009 // NaBloPoMo, Politics

I consider myself fairly neutral when it comes to politics. I’m not left-wing like Labour, central like the Lib Dems, or right-wing like the Conservatives. I’m quite middle-of-the-road, and am not loyal to any one party. I will be the first one to admit that my household sometimes votes on a trivial basis, because most of the party policies are quite similar these days, and it can get quite hard to differentiate between them all. What it all boils down to is how engaging they are, how much they connect with people, and what they can offer the community (i.e. if they have Twitter or Facebook and choose to communicate with their constituents, that’s a massive tick in my book).

With the general election coming up soon, the campaign posters are coming out again, encouraging people to vote for a particular party. The frivolous aspect that my family’s votes rely on this year are what they seem to portray in front of a camera.
They say a picture is worth a thousand words, and I think it shows. Most politicians don’t know how to act in front of a camera. The main candidates in my constituency seem to be a mixture of the stereotypes you see in schools and the workplace.

We have the cool, popular guy…

This is Virendra Sharma, the current Labour MP for the Ealing Southall constituency. He’s 62, but that doesn’t stop him from trying to be awesome and “with it”. This is failing.
Also, for some reason, his campaign vehicle is parked down my road, and has been since 2007.

Then there’s the serious one…

Gurcharan Singh is the Conservative candidate (although he defected from Labour in 2007). His face is currently appearing on local billboards everywhere. You can tell he thinks carefully about every decision he makes, but it seems to be reflected in his face. Is it sadness? Is it tiredness? Or is he just pissed off?
His squinty glare scares me as I walk down the road with bags of shopping.

And finally, we have the nerdy one. Because we all need one of those.

Nigel Bakhai is the Liberal Democrat who will be going up against the other two in the next election. You can tell by the awkward smile that he wants to do well, and will try to do well, but he hasn’t got a hope in hell of managing to do it because of the party he belongs to. Poor thing.

Usually, Labour and Conservative will gain the most votes, with the Lib Dems trailing behind. So, basically, the race is on between the cool guy and the serious dude.
Interestingly enough, as my area is mostly filled with people of South Asian origin, there is no BNP candidate for my constituency (because that would probably be a major fail). And the Monster Raving Loony Party member who is standing for the seat is the minister of chocolate.