While the national newspapers nail their colours merrily to varying (yet largely predictable) political masts as the General Election looms, we’re sticking stubbornly to our policy of remaining neutral where such things are concerned. As a consequence, we have three obvious options open to us. We could pretend it’s not happening (which would be weird); we could talk in very vague terms without ever declaring an opinion (which is both difficult and dull); or we could go to town on everybody in the hope that it might raise a smile or two (which is fun but there are plenty of professional satirists who will do it better, especially now all the party leaders are caricatures and easy targets).
Fortunately (for us, at least) there is a fourth way… the reboot. We have a theory that there are only about six original viewpoint pieces in existence – the rest are just rehashes – so in the interests of transparency, our manifesto pledge to you is to declare on this page whenever we’re appropriating bits of an old editor’s viewpoint for the modern world. And when we say whenever, we mean all of the time.
This, then, is our take on the 2017 vote, skilfully constructed (or possibly hastily cobbled together) from previous years when we went to the polls. Incidentally, in 2005 we did pretend the General Election wasn’t happening – and it was weird.
“One thing the next government will certainly need to be is green. With the deadlines for sundry environmental commitments approaching fast, it is vital that steps are taken to drive energy efficiency further into the mainstream.” [May 2015]
“Energy efficiency may not be a vote winner on the same scale as dragging us out of economic turmoil, NHS expenditure or the state of our education system, but it’s a subject that matters to many and should matter to many more.” [May 2010]
It is easy to argue that there is very little that one individual can do to alter the course of future legislation, but that is all the more reason why we should use what little power we have to influence events. [May 1997]
“We’ll vote with our hearts or with our heads and then we’ll hope we made the right choice. Of course we’ll never know if we did because we’ll never tread the other path. But we’ll have to live with the choice we made for better or worse.” [June 2016]
See you in five years, when we’ll probably all be banging the same drum into the same void.
