And still 5 weeks to go

It's not that I'm not interested in politics. I care very much about what our future is and try hard to keep up with the news. I'm just not interested in the EU referendum.

The Tory party got suckered into holding this referendum when UKIP were on the rise and Tory party managers were trying to stop MPs defecting. UKIP now seem to have fallen back a lot in England and Scotland (although for who knows what reason they have done well in the elections for the Welsh Assembly - did ex-Labour voters really think UKIP was an alternative to Labour?) And still we're stuck with this referendum campaign which seems to have been running for months and still has a long way to go.

Can you imagine how much it's costing to run campaigns for the two sides? Not to mention organising the voting. And if you have kids at school, you're going to have to arrange childcare for another polling day. You can bet your last pound, it's us, the tax-payers, who will be paying for it one way or another.

So what do we get for our money? Two sets of posh, middle-aged, white Tory men slugging it out for control of the Tory party. The Labour party haven't even joined in the argument yet. And if they did, they'd be lucky to get a mention in the newspapers or on TV. Despite all the Tory nonsense about wanting what's best for the hard-working people of Britain, these Tory guys are not interested in what we think. They're not really talking to the voters. They're talking to each other. This is about who's going to lead the Tory party after Cameron moves on.

I keep thinking of all the big problems we have in the UK: massive levels of inequality; runaway house prices in the south-east fuelled by the Tory failure to build houses; high unemployment in the north-east and north-west of England, in the West Midlands and large areas of Wales caused by the collapse of industry; the punishment of the sick and disabled through the so-called 'welfare' system; a national debt that's completely out of control; tax evasion and avoidance on a huge scale by multi-national companies; a minimum wage that no one can live on so it has to be subsidised by  - yes! - the tax-payer. And so on. None of this is being dealt with right now because the Tory government has a referendum to run.

If the Union still exists come the next general election, we could find ourselves fighting over a corpse.

I'll vote, of course - too many women gave their freedom and even their lives for me to refuse to cast my vote - but I suspect I'm not the only one looking at what's going on in this referendum campaign and thinking this is possibly worse than Thatcher's era: Thatcher and her merry men had an ideology behind their ideas. This lot are playing with the country.