The recent general election cast the spotlight on politics for us all.

The final month leading up to polling day was comparable to people desperately scrambling for tickets from touts outside of a venue. Where do you find the best touts? Are they the noisy ones? Are the tickets genuine? Are they the best price? Can I risk taking the time to deliberate and search out alternatives? Isn’t what matters that I get in to the venue, whatever the cost?

Compared with many of our European neighbours, we are fairly uninterested and uneducated in political history, ideology and organisation. How many of us have enough political insight to comprehensively cross-check party values and manifestos without majorly relying on the influences of others i.e. the media or the parties themselves? This lack of insight leaves us outside the venue without a ticket – through our own lack of foresight and interest our involvement is reliant on the soapbox antics of a small rabble of self-interested people.

I find tactical voting an interesting phenomenon. Using your very precious and scant democratic power, you decide not to favour values that best reflect your own but to prevent those that least do. I think though, with the rise of the minority parties, we are seeing less of this, which is pleasing. Tactical voting only serves the majorities. It is herd-like, pragmatic and irrational. Using your own mind to vote in line with your own beliefs (as suitably as possible) expresses your individual liberty, is idealistic and rational to the cause.

I think that this rationality is becoming more evident in this country. Seats are important at election time, but votes are the commodity of the market and all parties will be looking to target the growing vote share of the minority parties by appealing to their electorate over the development of the term.

Also, we should never take the ideal out of our vote. Why be pragmatic about a future term of government we have no further control in? Vote for the best of all possible worlds beforehand, as claiming the case afterwards is grossly optimistic.

This month's favourites:
   She & Him, Classics
   Victor Hugo, Les Misérables
   Prison (1949)