Today, 7th of May is the D-day for voters and parties across the United Kingdom. People will be trooping to cast their votes in an election that is confusing with the prospect that whoever wins will not have an absolute majority.
Labour, the Conservatives, UK independence party, the Liberal Democrats and the Scottish nationalists are all making last gasp efforts to woo voters to their corner. In this tight and unpredictable election, every vote cast will count. Whilst political operatives and candidates representing the parties have been pounding the streets, a certain form of myopia has set in-the myopia of voter indifference and general dissatisfaction with politics even at this 11th hour, with barely a few hours before voters go to the polls.
The final outcome may well hinge on those undecided voters and they are in their multitudes, a constituency that has detached itself from politics and remain as an apathetic erstwhile fence-sitters. Watching the BBC's Evan Davis on Newsnight last night brought the state of affairs closer to home. There is a general disillusionment with politics in the UK, with main parties for example Labour and the Conservatives increasingly having to append themselves to parties that would have been hitherto considered as fringe parties like the SNP and UKIP.
Leafing through the UK press today, I came across countless articles that discussed the possibility of a hung parliament with the Times Newspaper raising an even more eerie outcome.
According to the Times, Liberal Democrats Nick Clegg made an impassioned plea to voters ahead of the elections, asking them to vote for the Liberal Democrats to avoid the excruciating experience of having to undergo another pointless general elections in six months. His logic was, there would be no clear winner in the elections with an outright majority leading to a feeble government that could collapse like a pack of cards in a few month's time.
He argued that the Liberal Democrats could be relied upon to unlock the political logjam rather than giving the carte blanche to fringe parties like UKIP to promulgate or at least take part in the decision making process that would affect each voter in the UK. He was sanctimonious in his aversion that the Liberal Democrats were the only party who put the interest of the country first before everything else.
In this elections, no one is sitting pretty, they are all squirming in their chairs dealing with different outcomes and hair raising scenarios with increasing number of voters finding it particularly hard to settle on a particular party, let alone a specific candidate.
The barrage of advertisements by different parties on TV and the increasingly muddled information have added to the frustrations of the average voter. The political system is having a series of serious jolts and tremors and is being shaken to the core. We may have to leave like the Japanese for the foreseeable future with potentially two or three different prime ministers in four years, after all who knows what will be the outcome of this calamitous elections?
Which way the political pendulum will swing tomorrow?
