IN response to John Bickley UKIP Parliamentary candidate for Weaver Vale, Guardian, July 23.

Some of the points he makes are well founded, but where I do take issue with his statement that the Conservatives and Liberals have misled the electorate for 40 years.

The majority of politicians and their parties have deceived and misled the people of these islands in some form or another since Cromwellian times.

Let’s go back to the First World War. The powers that be conned men into believing it was their duty to fight for their country. It was such an honour that if you were a conscientious objector you were ostracised. At war’s end men were told by the political classes that they would come home to a land fit for heroes. Did they?

The country was also told that the 1914-18 war was the war to end all wars. Was it?

And so we arrive at where we are now. With the city of London’s banking quarter and the Westminster village with its previous litany of ping pong ball governments and its current coalition incumbents.

The NHS continues to suffer as a result of dysfunctional and bureaucratic miss-management.

Today’s troops are being deployed into conflict zones with inadequate equipment. But the best has to be redundancy notices issued while still on active deployment in a war zone.

Sections of the media are as much to blame with their reporting bias. And not let’s forget the guilt of some of the tabloids, police and the churches’ appalling shenanigans.

The world’s moral compasses have definitely deviated to such an extent they are no longer fit for purpose The end result is that the ordinary person rightly feels aggrieved.

It’s a sad indictment in a 21st century society of the developed world which allows its democratically elected governments to fail to protect its country’s most vulnerable.

Those who died in two wars died believing ‘democracy’ would benefit future generations. Regrettably, ‘accountable democracy’ has been highjacked.

Like the majority of this country’s electorate I have no vested political affiliation, I too feel disenfranchised. But the current model has got to change and change dramatically.

Come polling day, go to the polling station and underneath all the candidates listed, write ‘none of the above’. Not only will you have made the effort out of respect for those who laid down their lives in two world wars, you will send a clear message that the electorate are far from happy.

Let’s at least try to return some sense of moral values and rational sanity to an all too often misused democratic ideal.

David North Winsford