Weekly please Mister Woodward.

On the subject of the proposed Welborne development – 6,000 new dwellings to be constructed on a greenfield site – this will be Café Spike’s final eve-of-election foray into this territory. We have a few things we’d like to say before we close the book on this subject and get back to posting a mix of comedy and articles which we think you may find interesting. We hope that as you read this article you’ll consider having a look at the other material our site has to offer. We mainly set out to entertain and amuse, but being based in Fareham we feel it appropriate to express our opinion over Welborne and local politics.

It’s pretty much a given that the Conservative party will take Fareham’s seat in Westminster, with Suella Fernandes as our representative in Westminster. Ergo, as surely as night follows day Welborne will become a stark reality Along with that will come the increasing burden on our infrastructure, with additional pressure being piled on our NHS, traffic chaos, agency jobs, a less than vibrant town centre, and essentially a future not as a community in our own right; just a dormitory community for London and other large centres in our area.

Which begs one to pose the question: Why is Fareham such a safe Conservative parliamentary seat?

We can afford Welborne, we can afford nonsensical traffic “solutions,” we can afford to do things like install pedestrian crossings a few yards away from an existing crossing, (Think Highlands Road) we can afford to charge extortionate parking fees, we can afford to have our town centre homogenised into a clone of every other town centre, totally devoid of any trace of local character, populated my multinational chains that most of us have no interest in using…and on and on.

But we can’t afford to keep our roads in good shape, we can’t afford to have weekly bin collections, and we can’t afford to fully inform our own people about proposed developments which will have far reaching effects on the lives of the people in our community.

Surely there’s something wrong somewhere? So how does this happen?

In fairness, most people who vote in general elections vote in order to influence the bigger picture – the national picture. People vote for the government they want because they feel that by doing so they’re doing what’s best for the country as a whole. Which is what makes this election crucial in our constituency, because the bottom line is that a Conservative vote will deliver Welborne. Thus local and national issues become inextricably entwined.

There are going to be people from this borough torn between their local and national political overviews, which is an unhappy situation.

Which is where I come clean and nail my underpants (stains and all) to the mast.

I was brought up in a safe Labour seat, and I could never see the sense in that either. People would vote Labour in spite of the evidence that their town was spinning into freefall decline everywhere they looked, but they seemed insanely oblivious to what was going on around them. So why do we vote blindly? Why do we take the safe option?

The media. That’s the simple answer.

Readers of the Times, Sun, Mail, Express, Telegraph and viewers of Sky News tend to vote Conservative. Readers of the Mirror tend to vote Labour. Guardian readers tend to be left of centre but seem to be too busy plucking fluff out of their navels to be arsed even voting at all. My point is that voting trends are heavily influenced by the media, whether we like it or not. Even the Independent is supporting a Conservative/Liberal Democrat coalition. So it isn’t actually as Independent as it would like to think.

Media owners have a vested interest in whoever may be incumbent in Number Ten, because they want to protect their wealth, maintain their power and influence, retain their virtually zero tax responsibilities and drop the odd crumb here and there to make Joe Public feel like he’s getting a fair crack of the whip.

If you think that’s a biased assumption, it might pay to remember how Ed Miliband was relentlessly ridiculed, how the media twisted the public perception of the Labour party into one of a paedophile/grooming gang sympathising nest of vipers, how Nick Clegg has been castigated for selling his party down the river, when the reality is that having entered into a coalition agreement he had little say in the matter. And what of UKIP and the Scottish Nationalists? I’m no lover of UKIP – I detest extreme right wing politics as much as I detest extreme left wing politics, but the smear campaigns against Nigel Farage and Nicola Sturgeon carried out by the media have reached pantomime proportions. It’s out of control, and people can’t seem to see beyond that.

Yet the Conservatives – despite having the worst record of any government in a century – are somehow looked upon as our saviours?

What we’d advise is that when you vote, you vote for the candidate best equipped to do the job you want them to do. Matters not if that be Conservative, Lib-Dem, Labour, UKIP, or Independent. What we’d say is to go with your heart and mind and vote for what you truly believe in, the candidate who wants to work for the community, and not what Rupert Murdoch or any other media mogul tells you to do, because they don’t give a damn about you, or your loved ones. It’s all about the money, the power, the megalomania.

As I said earlier, as of Friday our elected parliamentary representative will be Suella Fernandes – that’s a given. Some will be unhappy about this, and many won’t even realise what it actually is that they’re voting for. They’re just going to put the cross where they always have done. Which is precisely why we have safe seats. People don’t know any better. They aren’t thinking for themselves. They’re letting the media do their thinking for them because it’s easier that way.

And with that, Café Spike will back off with the serious stuff and get back to doing what we usually do – which is quite frankly just silly. But no sillier than the lies we’re all drip-fed on a daily basis.

Use your vote wisely.

Martin Shuttlecock.