How to vote?

I should warn you that, in between reflecting on Spain, I am going to be having a few words to say about the Party Manifestos, hundreds of pages that I haven't had a chance to read yet, but have started and will finish.

At this minute , I am ploughing through them all, starting with Labour.

My first reaction is that all parties are trying to legislate too much, that they have equated good government with legislation. One response would be that they need to put everything they possibly can in their manifesto, as that protects them from an ambush from the House of Lords somewhere down the line (as I understand it, the Lords cant oppose plans in the ruling party's manifesto).

But honestly, the Labour manifesto is more than 80 pages, including quite a few pictures, and we do wonder who reads it and what it amounts to, and whether all this legislation is necessary to get to the goals they want. (I mean do we really want to guarantee  that anyone gets a GP appointment in 48 hours.. i mean maybe some GP surgeries know that some people dont need that..)

And an awful lot of muddle creeps in.

Of course, I looked first for the things that impacted on me. Here was one:

"We will create a Prime Minister’s Committee on the Arts, Culture and Creative Industries, with a membership drawn from all sectors and regions.  The Committee will bring issues of concern direct to the attention of the Prime Minister."|

Fine I thought, but what exactly is that? Who are the sectors and regions, and how exactly will their concerns come to the PMs attention? And who will these people be?

And if I were to vote Labour, I would need to know more than that they were backing a replacement for the Lords in the shape of  " an elected Senate of the Nations and Regions, to represent every part of the United Kingdom,and to improve the democratic legitimacy of the second chamber". So how was the election to be conducted, amongst whom and by what system? I find it in principle hard to sign up to a non elected second chamber, but I do think that, when people are more  and more worried about the elected professional political class, it is odd that they try to give it more power. I challenge anyone to say that people like cross benchers Martin Rees and Onora O'Neill and Patrick Hennessy  are not among the jewels of the House of Lords. Would any one of them stand in a party political electoral system? Bet not.

I have to say that I also missed in the Labour Manifesto any sense that what I did, as a cultural worker,  was any kind of contribution to the national good at all. I got the feeling that I was the icing on the cake, not someone earning money by cultural work (if money is your criterion). Where is their calculation I wondered about how much cash came into this country thanks to the efforts of people like me..foreign students, the underpinning of movies and west-end plays etc etc.

Many of the others manifestos are worse, and I shall come to them in due course. This is just a first gnaw at the first out.