Whatever the UK election result, it will be miserable

It's polling day and Britain faces a miserable choice. Whichever way it goes it'll be disastrous.

The two main parties, the Tories and Labour, are neck and neck with a group of smaller parties snapping at their heels with increasing support.

The economy is still in a deep hole. The recovery is half-baked and fragile and based on an increasingly low-wage economy while the fat-cats keep getting fatter.

The Tories continually blame Labour for the crash of 2008 although they were Her Majesty's Opposition at the time and meant to hold the government to account. The two sides now bore the electorate rigid by bickering endlessly over how best to slice up the same old cake.

Half-baked bickering

It hasn't occurred to them that we need something new. We need to re-industrialise and expand our manufacturing base. But that obvious truth is not part of the election debate, nor have the media probed in that direction. Why?

Because they don't know how. There seems to be a conspiracy to supply us only with political automatons and have no understanding of industry.

Otherwise we would not, for example, have allowed foreign corporates to walk in and plunder the opportunities provided by our natural wind resources and develop huge offshore and onshore turbine 'farms' using foreign skills and foreign equipment and taking the profits home to Germany, Norway and Denmark.

We'll face a similar threat from US corporate giants when the trans-Atlantic trade deal (TTIP) currently under negotiation with the EU, is completed - and who trusts that unelected mega-bureaucracy to get anything right?

Where did election front-runner David Cameron come from? Probably nobody outside Westminster and his constituency had heard of him until he became Tory leader in 2005.

Before then he had worked for Conservative Research Department and as a ministerial 'adviser'. He also held an executive job with a media company but had only four years' experience as an MP when handed the top job.

He was educated at Eton and Oxford where he was a member of the upper class Bullingdon Club. Other members included George Osborne, now the chancellor, and London's mayor Boris Johnson.

And where did Labour's Ed Miliband spring from? If we didn't have Ed as leader we'd have been saddled with his brother David, who has already caused great embarrassment as foreign secretary. The party has genuine talent, so how did this dismal duo rise to the top?

Ed doesn't seem to have held any meaningful job outside politics and it shows whenever he opens his mouth.

Ed doesn't seem to have held any meaningful job outside politics and it shows whenever he opens his mouth.

Cameron's campaign director Lynton Crosby's firm is thought to have lobbied Cameron and the government on behalf of private healthcare clients to expand privatisation in the NHS - something Cameron has sworn not to do.

You'll remember too how Cameron hired another dodgy character, Andy Coulson, as his communications chief. He was mixed up in the big phone hacking scandal and went to jail. Cameron is not blessed with good judgment.

He voted for the Iraq war, demonstrating a woeful lack of due diligence on the reasons and evidence. He voted for the devastation of Libya in 2011, as did both Milibands.

In 2013 he was straining at the leash to bomb of Syria but was stopped in his tracks by a narrow vote in the Commons.

Cameron has unswerving support for Israel, telling a recent Conservative Friends of Israel lunch.: "I am a passionate friend of Israel – and that's the way it's going to stay."

Addressing Israel's Knesset, he pledged to defeat any boycotting of Israel. "Britain opposes boycotts," he said, without consulting the British people and ignoring the rapid growth of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement.

He continued: "With me, you have a British prime minister whose belief in Israel is unbreakable and whose commitment to Israel's security will always be rock solid."

According to the Jewish Chronicle, Cameron assured Israeli leaders: "As far as I’m concerned, an enemy of Israel is an enemy of mine. A threat to Israel is a threat to us all."

Cameron was painfully slow to criticise Israel for its slaughter of Palestinians in Gaza last summer.

Cameron was painfully slow to criticise Israel for its slaughter of Palestinians in Gaza last summer.

He also wants to renew our non-independent nuclear deterrent and its Trident submarines at a crippling cost to the taxpayer.

Fortunately others are determined to rain on his parade, principal among them the Scottish National Party under feisty Nicola Sturgeon who has promised to "lock the Tories out of Number 10" if she gets the chance.

And she might well do, as the SNP will probably end up with 50 or more seats in Westminster and upset everyone's arithmetic. The Tories are already near-extinct in Scotland - only one seat - and Labour faces being almost wiped out.

Such is the Scots' anger and disgust after decades of neglect at the hands of Westminster that the SNP is enjoying a massive surge in popular support following the narrow defeat in the independence vote last September.

The also-rans could between them come away with nearly 100 seats out of the 650. Neither Cameron nor Miliband look like getting an overall majority, and whichever can cobble together a coalition is likely to pay a very high price.

Silliness has set in and feathers are getting very ruffled. Only on 8 May will the fun really begin.