Elections for people who don't follow politics

Its not hard to see why so many people in Britain feel excluded from the build up to the election on May 5, and from politics in general. The profusion of fake tans, glossy sales brochures and meaningless flannel make a western election campaign feel like an interminable convention of used car salesmen. Anyone trying to follow the debate is presented with candidates, journalists and commentators who speak in their own unfathomable political language, using jargon so arcane and terminology so obscure they might as well be discussing microeconomics. Often, that's exactly what they're doing.

The way politicians deal with the issues doesn't help. Politicians avoid specifics with the same energy and determination that children avoid bathtime. Their speeches form rollcalls of vacuous platitudes that just about any sane person would agree with (pro-life, tough on crime, against the slaughter of the firstborn) and because so many of their policies are remarkably similar to those of their rivals, voters find themselves returning to the same familiar questions. Which of these identikit jokers should I vote for? And since all I'm presented with is a factory line of party androids, pre-programmed to spout the same inanities, buzzwords and slogans, is there any point in me bothering to vote at all?

There are a few websites that can help people who find themselves apparently without a ticket to this pantomime get a proper look at the issues and the options available. This page on the BBC News website lets you compare the parties policies at a glance, on a range of different issues. With a couple of clicks you can compare any three parties from a selection of 20. Its highly accessible, user friendly, and also links to the various manifestos if you want a bit more detail.

The Political Survey takes your views and uses opinion poll data to show you where you sit in comparison with the rest of the population and with the supporters of the various parties. It comes up with some interesting results and is well worth a look.

In the same vein there's Who Should You Vote For, which is less sophisticated but slightly quicker.

And quickest and least sophisticated of all is the Observer Blog Vote-o-Matic .

Finally, on the question of whether or not one should vote, I'll just briefly repeat what I've said in earlier posts. Whatever the shortcomings of our democracy we still enjoy a far greater degree of political freedom than most societies. Because that allows us some influence over how our country is run we all then share in the responsibility for what our government does. Everyone's responsible for the consequences of their actions or inaction, and that simple truism applies here no matter how poor our electoral system or how narrow our choices. So there's a moral obligation on us to vote; especially since the way the Government conducts itself is literally a matter of life or death. The Iraq war is only the most obvious, current example of this. If Britain was as affected by the actions of foreign countries as Iraq is, we'd certainly hope that people in those counties would do all they could to ensure that their governments acted responsibly.