It’s an old line and as true as ever: Whoever you vote for, the government wins.

I will not be distracted by arguments over which variety of shit I prefer: Tory versus Labour or new flavour LibDems; nor wonder about UKIP and BNP. Sure the main dog and cat faeces smell worst, since they feed on our food chain waste, and perhaps less offensive odours emanate from the fringe parties. Perhaps the LibDems excrement is comparable to horseshit with the UKIP smelling of fox and the BNP of wolf.  But rest assured that if any of them came to power, their shit would soon smell the worst of all.

There is a chapter in my first book titled “Divide and Rule” and I reproduce a few paragraps from it below.

"One of the silver-linings for the state provided by the new multi-party system of government is that the rulers of the day (the In Party) can always blame many of the problems facing us, upon the last party that was in power (the Out Party).

Failing this, they assure us that the problem would be much worse than it already is if the Out Party were dealing with it. “Let us continue doing a bad job because the Out Party would do an even worse one.” After a decade or so, kings, emperors and dynasties could not continue to use this excuse.

The flip side of this silver-lining works for the Out Party because they can always point at the In Party and declare, with some justification, that most of our problems are being caused by what the In Party is doing. The conclusion we are expected to make is that because the Out Party can perceive the connection between the In Party and the problem, they will be able to fix it if we make them the In Party. The strong supporting evidence is that before the In Party took power, when possibly the Out Party was running things, the problem was not as bad as it is today. That evidence, unfortunately, is usually to hand.

You probably had to read that last paragraph closely to avoid being confused by the terms In Party and Out Party. It is hard to follow the thread for the reason that there is so little difference between the two. H.L. Mencken summed it up much better when he wrote in 1956:

Under democracy, one party always devotes its chief energies to trying to prove that the other party is unfit to rule - and both commonly succeed, and are right.

But it is a handy mechanism for the state and helps to keep us divided in our support of one team or another."

Note: It was Leo Tolstoy, Russia’s most famous author, and noted vegetarian and pacifist, who first coined this dogshit/catshit analogy when ‘put on the spot’ to choose between Tsarist killers and communist revolutionary killers.