Never Voted in my Life!

As the title says, I have never voted in my life, not for national OR local elections. The reasoning behind this was simple; I believed that ALL politicians were self-serving and as bad as each other. Then I developed disabilities, both physical and mental, and I started paying more attention to politicians and the policies they were making that would affect me personally. Over the course of the last few months, it has dawned on me that my reasoning for not voting was flawed to a degree, and that it did not take account of politicians who were worse than the rest. As such, I am now prepared, for the first time in my life, to vote.

With my disappointment over the Welfare Reform Bill, continued disappointment with the Health and Social Care Bill and future disappointment (?) of the Legal Aid Reform Bill something has been made abundantly clear. There are political parties that are destined never to receive my vote due to the huge amount of distrust they have instilled into me with their incessant vilification of disabled people, manipulation of figures to draw favourable headlines from the national press, surreptitious attempts to introduce privatisation where it is not wanted and the diminishing of my right to seek legal counsel when people abuse the system to my disadvantage. I cannot justify voting for a political party that would seek to deny me the small dignity of not being assumed a liar, of being denied medical care because it is not profitable or being less deserving in the eyes of the law simply because of my financial circumstances.

So, I now accept that I cannot vote for the Conservatives or the Liberal Democrats, for they are the very parties that are conspiring to deny me the rights that my parents enjoyed and that I spent a lifetime working for on the assumption that I would be entitled to them as well. I imagine the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats are now shaking in their respective Gucci shoes and designer wellingtons knowing this. However, I have power now as I wave my single vote in the air and contemplate who to bestow the privilege on of being the first to ever receive it.

To my mind, there are three other options available to me - the Labour party and their steel toe capped working boots, the Green party and their ozone friendly sandals or UKIP and their bare feet (because they haven't decided what pair of shoes to put on). From my perspective, the most important objective for the future is to remove the coalition Government from power so, from a purely tactical point of view, the only real alternative is Labour. I don't readily identify myself as a Labour voter though, having been white collar most of my life, which is a problem - being apolitical for so long is going to prove to be a headache when it comes to granting the power contained in my single vote.

Who is going to convince me to part with my vote first?

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