Why You Should Vote 'No Candidate Deserves My Vote'

by David Robjohns

I'm representing the 'No Candidate Deserves My Vote' party because in the run up to this election I've grown frustrated listening to terrible policies, broken promises and downright lies from the party leaders. My party's aim is to allow voters an alternative to choosing the best of a bad bunch.

We have one single policy; to add 'none of the above' to the bottom of polling papers. That way people can register their discontent with the candidates standing to become their MP. In the 2010 election, 17.4 million people registered to vote but didn't cast their votes. That's as many votes as the Tory-Lib Dem coalition got combined. Translated into seats, non-voters outnumbered the votes for the winning candidate in a whopping 430 constituencies. Many non-voters didn't vote simply because no candidate had done enough to deserve their vote, and it's easy to see why.

Recently, 97 MPs were asked what the probability of getting two 'heads' when flipping a coin twice was.  This is fairly basic maths, and I expect the majority of readers would be able to correctly say the answer is one quarter.  Yet, staggeringly, only 40% of MPs got this right. These are people we've voted in to make difficult judgements about public sector pensions, which involve compound interest and actuarial calculations, or foreign policy interventions, which involves considering probabilities. The fact that less than half of them were correct is not acceptable.

Unfortunately, there's no improvement when you look at the policies of the parties they represent.  The Conservatives have promised £21 billion towards the NHS, raising the tax-free allowance and freezing rail fares.  But they have no idea where this money is coming from. In 2010 they promised they wouldn't raise VAT... But they did.  Every Labour government has left unemployment higher than when they came in, and furthermore they plan to abolish zero-hour contracts, despite 70 of their MPs employing people on them. 

The Lib Dems are renowned for breaking promises; Nick Clegg promised no rise in tuition fees, more police officers and reduced rail fares.  But he didn't block a huge rise in tuition fees, he didn't block the cutting of 15000 police officers and he didn't block rail fares rising every year!  UKIP plan to cut education to build aircraft carriers, totally ignore climate change and raise tax for the poorest 88% of Britons.  The Greens plan to abolish the tax free allowance, meaning children and low earners will pay tax on whatever they have. I could go on. Why would you vote for any of them?

Voting for my party will stop unwanted candidates being elected.  Any elected MP from my party would act as an independent on all issues, so instead of slavishly following bad party policies, they can get the best for their constituency on every issue by finding out exactly what the constituents want, and prevent the other parties from sabotaging the UK's and indeed our futures.

So use your vote to elect a candidate who will truly represent the views of this constituency: vote for me; vote 'none of the above'.