My voter registration papers have turned up – I just haven’t decided what to do with them yet…

Letters from a Swing Voter

“I don’t want to belong to any club that would have me as a member”, once said the other Marx, and I raise my champagne socialist glass to that. Don’t your toes curl with embarrassment at the thought of meeting a real Mondeo Man or a stay-at-home-Mumsnet? Who are these aggregated personifications of data, slowly eating away at the dark recesses of my mind where I store the rainy-day reminders that I Am Unique, You Cannot Categorise Me, and Pah – No One Can Tell Me What To Do.

Like all the worst members’ clubs, party politics rather loses its appeal when it’s a party you’re not having any fun at. The kind where you’ve only gone along because your mate was, and frankly there wasn’t anything else to do other than watch the Hollyoaks Omnibus and drink piss-poor wine. The kind where you end up meeting people as homogonously uninteresting as you’ve managed to be, and your world keeps spinning in roughly the same direction. That sounds like a pretty lame party to me.

So here’s the thing. Once upon a time, an election fell just two weeks after my 18th birthday, and I went from being a petulant teenager to a born-again active citizen with a ballot paper and the belief that something I did could quite possibly change the world. My family home is a chaotic reminder that life should never get in the way of your imagination, and is generally filled to the gills with the overspill of one creative, loving father and one increasingly mad and feminist mother. My parents talk of Thatcher with a venom reserved only for those who choose to kill kittens and children in their spare time, and spit at your feet if you cross the threshold with any rag other than the Guardian. Labour runs through them like a stick of rock. I was taught to believe that the Left way was the right way, and I was, by default, a fully-fledged member of Our Little Club.

But I have come to expect more from my politics. Quite frankly, the party’s over, the lights have come back on and we’re too skint to get a taxi home. I am left with too much debt, too much insecurity, too much prejudice, ignorance and inequality. Labour, you have failed me. You have failed because you tried to be too many things to too many people, but you failed to be just one thing to me.

So this means I am a swing voter; too angry to vote Labour, too stubborn to vote Conservative, too confused to vote Lib Dem. It’s eerily prescient that the day I write this, my Voter Registration papers have turned up in the post, wouldn’t you say? Therefore, these coming weeks will see me flit between parties, painting as true a picture as possible of their campaign flirtations, as I see them. And you, dear reader, may come with me if and when I make my decision and exercise that most fundamental of rights. Because everyone knows it’s best to leave a party when it starts to get messy.