Candidate's debate

I'm about to watch the very first American style candidate's debate on TV. The media have been building up to it all day, speculating on which policies are going to capture the nation's imagination and win votes. Now the moment has arrived it feels like a damp squib.

I've been reading manifestos from the principal parties, and based on those, none of the major contenders really attracts me. I started my voting life as a member of the Young Conservatives, and I have worked for the party in the past to win marginal seats such as North Portsmouth. On the face of it, where I live now, in Havant, looks like a safe Conservative seat.

But I can tell you Mr Cameron, and Mr David Willetts, the Conservative candidate for Havant that it is far from that. I very much doubt that it would go to a Labour candidate, but a result for the Liberal Democrats is a very real possibility. I've been listening to what my friends and neighbours are saying. Beware.

Naturally, I was most interested in the aspects of the manifestos most likely to affect me personally. I'm still on sickness benefit and still suffering from depression which ebbs and flows but never really seems to get totally better. One of the reasons for this is that my local mental health services are overwhelmed. They are ALREADY seeing cuts and valuable staff diverted to other areas. My GP told me only a few days ago that there is very little hope of me getting access to therapies that might help me because she has tried to get urgent first referrals into appointments at Parkway and they are saying 6 to 8 weeks at the earliest. I can tell you that saying this to someone with a depressive illness may well end up in a suicide attempt, even if they are handed out anti-depressants.

In Mr Cameron's manifesto, he tells me that everyone on Incapacity Benefit will be re-assessed to see if they are fit for work.I am assuming he includes Employment and Support Allowance as well - perhaps he doesn't know it exists. I was wrongly assessed by Labour's quango ATOS as fit for work. Thousands of others in this country have had the same experience, including people with terminal cancer and people receiving treatment in psychiatric hospitals. Most of us have appealed and had our benefit granted after a tribunal. Why has this happened? Because the application form isn't fit for purpose and because ATOS reportedly employs medical assessors who don't meet standards for the NHS either because their qualifications in other countries are not adequate or because they don't speak English well enough.

Mr Cameron, are these the people who you are going to waste money on all over again, or are you instead going to accept the word of our primary NHS carers - the doctors and mental health workers who see us every week and know us and our illnesses well. They can tell you that the idea that 'work' - if only we could get it - is a 'cure' for depression and similar problems is a total and ridiculous myth. I can't think of an employer that would accept me arriving for work at 11am. Not because I am lazy and idle but because the medication I need to take makes me feel tired and exhausted all the time.

I haven't seen anything in any of the manifestos which addresses the problem of age discrimination in employment. Why do we need a stream of immigrants to the country when there are skilled older British people who could fill vacancies if only they were allowed to?

Mr Clegg was suitably woolly on both the above topics. The only thing I would praise his manifesto for, is the way the Liberal Democrats have costed their proposals.

I have been making some efforts to get back to work. I've been doing an IT course at a local FE college that would enhance the skills I already have. My tutor has told the class that he won't have a job for the rest of the year because the Labour Government have ALREADY slashed the college budget not just for adult education, but for vocational and other courses for school-leavers too. Is this the action of a party who want the votes of first time voters and out-of-work adults?

As an ESA claimant I had to go through a back to work process while I was waiting for my tribunal hearing and was far from well enough to benefit from it. Even if I said I was well enough for work tomorrow, I couldn't revisit that help or see the same people, because as a JSA claimant, I would be on a 'different programme'. What a total waste of money!

Why is it that people on ESA get more benefit than on JSA? I lived for 7 months on the JSA rate while waiting for my tribunal hearing or rather I failed to live. How is anyone expected to survive on £64 per week when their energy costs in the middle of winter were nearly half of that amount. I ran up debts and an overdraft. When I got the money I SHOULD have got after the tribunal, it went to pay debts. What I get now is barely enough even with my mortgage and council tax paid. My bank manager is rubbing his hands in glee because the courts allowed him to carry on scourging me for unreasonably high bank charges. I have no doubts that this was a directive from a Labour Government terrified that the banks might collapse if they had to pay it all back.

Assuming that I stay on the same income I am now, I don't see one single policy in any manifesto that is going to SAVE me any money on what I buy, quite the reverse. I don't see any proposals to ensure that the energy companies pass on their cost savings on wholesale energy to the consumers. They make massive and obscene profits every single year. My house is already insulated and double glazed, so no help there. What WOULD help me is for the Government to pay 100% up front for some solar panels on my roof . The repayments could come out of future savings on heating water and electricity, plus any profit I make sending power back to the grid.

I'm watching the leaders now. I see the same pathetic schoolboy bickering as happens every day in the House of Commons. I'm not seeing anyone I trust enough to run this country for the next 5 years, and what would happen in a hung Parliament really scares me. Would anything EVER get done?

It is too much to hope that any of the potential leaders ever read this blog and actually care about the real issues here. Maybe they would be better off sitting down and reading some of the blogs and tweets from the British electorate to know what we really think about them and their policies. I have not yet made my mind up who to vote for. Maybe if enough desperate people in my constituency sickened with this lot decided to vote Green, we would return the first Green MP to Parliament.