Which would you rather have? Go on, choose.
If you don’t choose, you’re failing in your duty as a citizen to engage in the process of selecting the powers that will rule over you and shape your destiny in the coming years.
Ludicrous, no? Okay, let’s try another one.
Tory or Labour? Which would you rather have?
You see the problem. Both are deeply immiserating, highly likely to diminish your quality of life, rob you of your independence and hasten your demise. You could end up with either, irrespective of your preference.
So, in these days of information, search engines and an internet that never forgets, why do some people still support, cheer and argue for political parties as if they were football teams? Why do they not see politicians and parties for what they almost always are, irrespective of thier colours? Why do we not reject the whole shooting match and drive them all into the sea?
How can you rationally and in good faith conclude that while the Tories are ghastly, hypocritical, selfish idiots who put their short-term self interest ahead of the long term benefit of the country – all true – the Labour Party doesn’t tick all of those boxes with equal alacrity?
Conversely how can you decide that Labour are authoritarian, meddling, economically illiterate, and obsessed with identity politics, while overlooking the track record of the Tories over recent years regarding privacy, civil liberties, access to justice, constant meddling in “pubic health”, the persisting deficit, tax raids on entrepreneurs and landlords, the emergent consumer credit bubble, the lack of progress on housing, going on about the supposed gender pay gap, riding the transgender hobby-horse etc?
I wish I had an answer – even a coherent theory – other than the one where many people are idiots who have been indoctrinated, not educated, and whose intellectual curiosity stops at predicting who’ll win X-Factor.
The war, as I see it, really is not between Tories and Labour. That’s a distraction and a false distiction when it comes to ideology and practice, as I’ve illustrated before. The war is between the political classes and the people.
The only ray of hope is that 52% of voters from across the political spectrum probably understand this, and voted for Brexit as a way to not only stick it to the political establishment here and in Brussels (as well as the useful idiots in the entertainment and media industry), but also to bring the frontline in the war between the state and the people back home to Britain, the better to wrap out hands around its scrawny duplicitous neck.
The next step after Brexit ought to be regional autonomy between and within the comstituent countries of the UK. Yet as of now, much to no-one’s surprise, actual Brexit (hard Brexit, the only Brexit, the one we actually voted for) looks increasingly likely to be spirited away by the poltical establishment, in favour of a foul-tasting placebo, for our own good.
Placebos have been proven surprising effective of late, but they’re unlikely to be effective against AIDS or cancer, so the war goes on with no end in sight.
What time’s X-Factor on, again?
AJ
Al Jahom's Final Word 
This is what has always puzzled me. When the political establishment of whatever stripe does something ‘for our own good’, I’m always left with a hollow feeling that whatever was done was done for their convenience, not any supposed value of public ‘good’.