Political nonsense.

I am growing more than a little tired of hearing David Cameron tell us that his party is the party of working people. The party of people who work in extremely highly paid jobs perhaps! How are ordinary people persuaded to vote for the Conservatives? It has always mystified me. 

His latest ploy is to promise to revive the right to buy your council house, assuming that you are actually renting a council house and not paying an extortionate amount of rent to a private landlord. Being able to buy council houses won't help those people to get on to the property ladder. And we are a little obsessed in the UK with the idea of having to own our homes: an Englishman's home is his castle and all that sort of thing. Now, I can understand the desire to own a bit if property. And I know that my parents would probably not have bought a house if the chance to buy their council house had not come up. And yet ... and yet, having sold off council property in the past something was lost along the way. 

It used to be the accepted thing that a young couple rented their first home, usually a council house if they could manage it because that was the most reasonably priced. This enabled them to save up the deposit for a little place of their own. Some people never managed it and remained in their council house forever but no one thought any the worse of them for that - unless they were unfortunate enough to live in a really rough council estate, in which case the were pitied rather than looked down on. But if the only council housing available is precisely on those rough estates where no one chooses to live, then young couples nowadays are forced into the more expensive private rental market and bang goes their chance of saving any money for a house of their own. 

Surprisingly (to most British people anyway), in some other European countries it is much more common to rent and nobody feels inferior because they don't own the place they live in. Or maybe they do and nobody talks about it. Maybe I am just talking total nonsense. However, I still don't think David Cameron should pretend to be a man of the people. In fact, I don't think any of our politicians can truly claim to be a man of the people. That era seems to be in the past and nowadays they are all professionals, unfortunately! 

I came across a curious article about politicians, all about the most frequently Googled questions about them. For almost all of them, one of the things questioners wanted to know was how tall the politician was. Almost all the leaders of the main parties are nicely tall, hovering around or just above six feet tall, probably a sign of the good diet they had as children. Nigel Farage is considerably shorter, about five feet eight. This does not stop him making a lot of noise. Nicola Sturgeon is only five feet four but she is a Scotswoman after all and her people seem to look up to her anyway. 

But what a strange way of judging people. Maybe the ballot paper should tell us the age, height, marital status of candidates as well as the party they belong to. Perhaps we could also have a photo so that we could vote for the best looking!