With just five days left to decide how to vote, polls show that nearly half of us are still not fully made up — an unusually high number so late in an election campaign. I'm one of them.
I am a swing voter. I have never supported any particular party, but I change candidates from time to time based on who I think is best for the country at any given time. Ten million of us do the same, and I have done so enthusiastically in every general election since 1992.
But this time I just can't solve it and it's causing me a lot of trouble.
As I continue to agonize and think about it, I'm reminded of a little-remembered movie I loved from the '90s called Crazy People (tagline: “You have to be a little crazy to tell the truth”).
Dudley Moore plays a burnt-out New York advertising executive who, after a nervous breakdown, checks himself into a psychiatric hospital, where he shares with the other patients his sorrow over the duplicity of his industry.
Their reaction to him is novel: Why not tell the truth about what you're selling to Americans? His new friends get to work and come up with their own bluntly honest advertising slogans: “Volvos are boxy but good cars” and “Forget Paris. The French are noisy. Come to Greece. We're nicer.”
Dudley was excited and submitted it, and to his surprise, the truth won overwhelming support. To me, this is the heart of this campaign. I have an unquenchable thirst for honesty.
Here's the real truth: the UK is a bit of a mess. Not deadly, and not going to last forever, but a mess nonetheless.
We all know it. We see it every day: the potholes that never get fixed as we drive by them, the endless waits to get a child's doctor's appointment, the monthly rent or mortgage payment.
A series of crises and successive governments' habit of putting off the big problems has left the UK not just broken but bankrupt. We are paying record taxes for public services that are collapsing under the pressure of surging demand, and what were once big problems are now of seismic proportions.
But you wouldn’t know that if you had listened to what the political parties have been saying for the past five weeks.
You probably have your own lists, but here are my (foolish) expectations going into the election:
How can we go green without all going bankrupt? How can we afford to give up our gas boilers, petrol and diesel cars? Climate change is a big issue, but how many times have you heard this talked about in this election campaign?
How do we defend the continent from an increasingly aggressive Russia aligned with a nationalistic China? The world is in a truly frightening state. The generals say we are in 1937 again, but what is the plan?
How are we finally going to build enough housing to keep up with population growth? We haven't been able to do that since the 1960s, and now we're short 4.5 million housing units and prices are soaring.
And why has there been so little talk about the demographic time bomb that is now exploding? How will we care for another 6 million people in their 80s when the number of people in their 80s will soon double, when the social care crisis is already severe?
These challenges are all hard, and so will yours. But none of them are beyond the reach of our nation of inventors. They will require fresh ideas and bold reforms. Inevitably, there will be losers to the cause, and we may all have to get used to doing things differently, like paying new insurance premiums.
But you know what? I know that. Nobody expects life to be rosy right away.
What has happened instead is that party leaders have done their best to avoid seriously addressing these issues. When repeatedly questioned, they have equivocated, ignored or given condescending, vague answers. They have distracted us to obsess over Normandy berthing, bogus tax issues and election stakes. This is the worst general election campaign I can remember and the stupid dance is still going on.
Why don't politicians tell us the truth? It's a disingenuous act that fundamentally underestimates the electorate. We are too stupid to deal with reality.
Why don’t they grapple with the truth with us?
This is a dishonesty based on a fundamental underestimation of the electorate: We are too stupid to deal with reality, and if they tried to tell us about it, we would vote for the other guy. To quote another American movie from the 90s, we just can't accept the truth.
Today's party leaders believe this because they are inadequate leaders and lack confidence in their own abilities. Instead, they rely on a long-defunct style of politics that is obsessed with focus groups and polls, and has become overly mechanized — a style that panders to the lowest common denominator and kills the crucial political skill of persuasion.
What is most inexcusable is that today's politicians have never learned the greatest lesson of the past decade of world politics: that voters around the world crave real things.
So who do I vote for? I could choose the least bad option in an ugly baby contest, but I don't because then I would feel like my vote is insufficient and I would feel more and more unheard.
I'd be tempted to vote for Earl Binface, I like his policy of fixing the price of 99 flake ice cream at 99p, unfortunately he's just running against Rishi Sunak and I don't live in North Yorkshire.
The last thing I would want to do is vote “none of these” and publicly express my displeasure with all of them. But I can't do that because “none of these” is not on the ballot. In the United States, you can write anyone's name and it counts, so it is on the ballot.
Imagine, if you could, how many people would vote “none of the above” this time. Hundreds of thousands? Millions? And if they did, it would send a powerful signal to Westminster that politics absolutely must be conducted differently.
What I can still do is the next best thing: I can void my ballot anyway by writing “none of these.” Sure, only one or two vote-seekers will see the voided ballot, but every voided ballot must be counted and added to a special queue, and its number read out by every vote-seeker.
So here's how I vote. Call me a weirdo, but my real opinion will be heard on Thursday, and at least it will be my honest opinion.
Tom Newton Dunn is a political journalist and author.
