Election matters!

The general election day creeps closer and closer. As we won't be in the country on the fateful day, we have organised our postal vote and just need to pop the envelopes in the postbox. A friend of ours says she has always used the postal vote system. Maybe she doesn't want to walk to the nearest polling station. Possibly it was more convenient when she was working full time and she has just continued with the same old same old. One of her sons is unable to vote as he is in New Zealand. She tried to get a postal vote on his behalf but as he was not around to sign the form it was not possible. Presumably this is a measure to try to prevent the head of a household voting for the whole family. I wonder, however, if the young man in New Zealand could not have organised himself sooner and had his postal vote sent out to him. This is what happens when you rely on mum to do everything for you.

When the elections for mayor of Greater Manchester took place recently, we were momentarily concerned that we might have been disenfranchised. Polling day drew near and we had no voting cards. And yet we knew we were registered voters. So on the day itself, we went along to the polling station, equipped with various forms of i.d. and prepared to fight for our right to vote. In the event the people manning the booths, who did not know us from Adam, simply asked for our names and address and issued us with voting slips. Most irregular, in our opinion. Any unknown couple could have turned up there saying they were us and stealing our vote!

There are rumblings about introducing legislation denying people the right to vote if they do not have photo i.d. with them. I have mixed feelings about that. In cases like ours in the mayoral elections I think someone should have asked for proof of who we are but as a rule, if you have your polling card that should be enough. On the other hand .... Oh, that lack of trust is just not British, some might say. Bring on the i.d. cards, say I. Somehow I think that younger people, many of whom carry some form of i.d. around with them anyway so that they can purchase alcohol or get into clubs, might not object as much as older people.

As regards the missing polling cards for the mayoral elections, an odd thing happened. One day last week or perhaps the week before, in any case after we had received polling cards for the upcoming general election, what should pop through our letterbox but the missing mayoral election polling cards! Where had they been in the meantime? Who had been hanging on to them? Why? And why had they been delivered now, so long after their use-by date? Another little mystery which will most likely never be solved!

Things are getting tense with the elections. Theresa May has reverted to talking about Brexit, which after all was ostensibly her excuse for calling the thing in the first place. She says that if we should be daft enough to elect Jeremy Corbyn as PM, he would go "naked into the negotiating chamber". She went on to make a rather nasty little sexist joke about what an unpleasant image that conjured up. When we heard her say that we wondered if a male politician would have got away with such a remark about a female opponent. However, that section of her speech seems to have been airbrushed out of subsequent news reports. How strange!

It does go along with a general trend though. Labour Party gaffs are top news while Tory Party gaffs are swept under the media carpet. Even David Dimbleby, not the most unbiased of chairmen of discussion programmes, has been shouting about the media bias against Jeremy Corbyn and the Labour Party. And Laura Kuenssberg, the BBC's political editor, has been a teensy bit more biting in her questions to the PM. So maybe belatedly the tide of bias is turning. It does make one wonder where we would now stand if Corbyn had consistently received as much coverage as Nigel Farage had.

This topic is already the subject of academic studies and will provide material for Media Studies courses for years to come.

Meanwhile, we have just over a week to wait and see what will come of it all!