I think that here there is a general feeling of disconnect between the voters and the politicians. There are a number of things that I’ve observed that are helping make that chasm wider.

The first off is yes embodied by a graffito I saw in St Albans many years ago. It read… “It doesn’t matter who you vote for, the government always wins”. That was the perception in the min 1990’s, pre New Labour government (which did little to counter that sentiment). The issue here is that whatever happens, the man on the street looses out. Taxes go up, working conditions shift in favour of the employers, the rich get richer, the poor get poorer. This was compounded by the Labour party, whose history is embedded in the Trade Union movement, and was formed to represent the ordinary working people. They seem to be very keen to distance themselves from that image. Proper Labour died with John Smith.

There is no such thing now as a politician who has come from an ordinary working background. There are few stragglers in the Labour Party, but they are rapidly approaching an age where they will either leave or get shoved into the Lords to dose into old age. We certainly won’t see them again come the next Labour government. The current high-fliers of all three main parties have benefitted from a public school education, and have all gone on very similar political and economic courses at Oxford or Cambridge (in fact,. you’ll probably find a lot of them did the very same course at the same university). Career paths appear to include political advisory positions. Certainly none of them were postmen. Miliband(s), Clegg, Cameron, Osborne et al. are very privileged (and rich). They are career politicians. They know little about real life outside of the dark satanic mills of Oxbridge.

So there is this disconnect. Do they represent you? I suspect not. When I see one of them speak, I wonder how they could represent my views and values. Which is the third point. I’m pretty left wing in my views, and in the last general election I felt that the party that most represented my views was (oddly) the Lib Dems. Not the Labour Party. However, none are properly left wing. They are all now right of centre, and politics is being dragged in that direction not by consensus, not by public consensus, but by the need to focus on a very small patch of values which are represented by floating voters in marginal seats. Oddly, these floating voters all appear to fit into a certain demographic which have specific political interests.

The last general election skirted over various issues, and instead concentrated on a few issues, and I think it’s no surprise to learn that all three parties were saying ugh the same thing as each other. I get the feeling that there is really one political party, and your choice is one merely of colour. We got a coalition government simply because there is no real differentiation. No “killer policy”. No radical ideas from anyone. Just grey blandness. I guess we deserve it.

The council election this time had a good turn out. Not down to some political change, or dynamic personalities. No, the view of the electorate was to punish the Lib Dems for letting the Tories in. They got a severe pummelling, lost the AV referendum and for a party in power appear to be rather feebly represented.

And this is where we are. A ruling elite with little interest in how their decisions affect you or me. The “we are all in it together” phrase is well worn, and is delivered by the rich (remember - the cabinet is made up of millionaires) to the poor with little thought to how this kind of patronising language will be received (watch last week’s Question Time on iPlayer for a good illustration of the reaction to such a phrase). In effect, there is a huge disconnect, and I am not surprised that people feel their voting rights are being eroded, or that the boundary changes will favour the Tories over the other parties. Maybe they are, maybe they are not. There is a perception that you won’t be able to battle with a graphic on the news.

The poor don't always get poorer, and taxes don't always go up. Some people just have pessimism and whining hard coded into their DNA (as far as I can tell). there was no golden age when all was right in the world and Thatcher/whoever else we like to blame did not open Pandora's Box to rob us of it.

You don't win elections with ... (this is going to become a theme) ... fishmongers and plumbers as candidates. Remember that Parliament has a job to do, which is legislation, so lawyers are well qualified to be there. And politics is a complex process, so an educational background in its arts is also advantageous. And of those working class Parliamentary heroes, how many have never been involved in the politics of their trade union before entering the House? Probably none. You don't get in there without politicking first, lots of it.

They are not right of centre, you are left of centre and your vision is skewed. Here, I am defining the centre of the political ground as the happy middle where most of the voters are to be found, not as some notional point on scale or diagram of some sort written up by any political "scientists". It is disappointing to see all three parties fighting to capture the middle ground, with nobody really trying to persuade the voters to move out of it instead, but that has been tried many times, and it has been observed to fail. So any party that tailors its message to your point of view must accept electoral doom.

Perhaps this would change if our voting system did; but people were offered a chance to change it, and they were so collectively shallow that they turned it into a vote of confidence in Nick Clegg. That's the fault of the voters, there is nobody else to blame.

The history of politics in Britain, as almost everywhere is defined very much by competing vested interests. When there were hardlay any voters, the Tories represented the landowners, and the Whiggs stood for the merchants. When the vote expanded and the workers got used to having it, Labour took over the Libs social justice agenda, but stood for the unions, and the Tories stole the Liberal's free trade clothes to stand for the employers.

From WWII through to the early eighties, every politician with an industrial constituency was terrified of the unions (Lab and Tory alike), because any job losses would be taken out on their hide. This resulted in a disastrous industrial policy of massive subsidies, increasingly belligerent unions, and declining investment. Once that unraveled the left became pretty much unelectable. To see how it could hav been, look at Sweden. They have been to the left of us for God knows how long, but their politicians never took to the subsidy teat, failing industries were left to fail and competitive ones were given a boost. So they are still way to our left, and they still have heavy industrial manufacturing.

When that all came crashing down, Thatcher happened to be on hand. had the pieces been picked up by somebody with more appetite for consensus building, then most of what Thatcher actually did would still have been done. There would have been deregulation, privatisation, and closure of loss making state owned industry, albeit each of those could have been accomplished with less cackling and more common sense. But we got Thatcher, and she set an agenda - with a heavy emphasis on talking about tax cuts (but much less emphasis on delivering them).

Now Thatcher has been gone a long time, so the fact that her legacy remains intact deserves some consideration. Everyone can see that we should spend more money as a society on things that are scandalously failing (education, crime). Yet everybody knows that if you say I will fix education and crime by raising taxes, nobody will vote for you. We know that the guy who promises to find massive savings in Whitehall, and to use this efficiency gain to make those things better is lying, but the known liar gets voted for ahead of the obviously truthful candidate - every time.

So we are collectively fat and greedy enough that we don't care if other people's children can count, or if grannies in areas we don't live can walk the streets at night. If we have to chip in to change things, no change is is required. But after we have voted for an agenda that we know in advance is a lie, we like to collectively whinge because it works out all wrong and we have scandals where babies are beaten to death. The root cause is always underfunding, and the required fix is always taxes.

That's the problem with our politics, the voters. We won't vote for any candidate unless they promise not to request from us the tools they require to do the job. The problem with the politicians is that none of the present set has enough charisma or vision to inspire any change in that. And any that did would just be another dangerous demagogue like Thatcher anyway.

Indeed.

We should take a leaf out of our neighbour's book. Just look at Denmark who have voted in their first female PM on the back of a promise to increase taxes and improve national services with the money.

I couldn't see that working with voters in the UK. The majority seem to want to pay no tax and yet have everything well funded.

Very well written and thought out - totally agree