A DEADLOCKED poll between a Conservative Party (which contrives to avoid 'conserving' Britain) and a Labour Party (which does its best to overlook 'the labouring classes') is a warning of the shape of things to come.

The poet WB Yeats wrote in The Second Coming, his most prophetic of poems, if 'the centre cannot hold...'things fall apart.'

If you feel yourself plodding to the polling station this Thursday with a clothes peg on your nose, nil desperandum.

Democracy in Britain can be resurrected, but only when representative democracy is replaced by direct democracy.

This means we must take responsibility for our own financial, ethical and ecological lives instead of allowing ourselves to be led by the nose by a venal political elite.

Meanwhile, just as Britain emerged from a phoney war on May 10, 1940 so Britain will once again 'emerge' on May 8, 2015 from a phoney election.

If you wish your fellow citizens to avoid the fate of Sisyphus (who was punished for chronic deceitfulness by being compelled to roll an immense boulder up a hill, only to watch it roll back down, repeating this action forever) keep your 'voting' powder dry this Thursday, for the political turbulence, which will surely follow this General Election, will render its indecisiveness irrelevant.

By marking 'none of the above' on Thursday's ballot paper you can cast your vote (not your fate) to the wind where, in this most deceitful of elections, it naturally belongs.

'Surely some revelation is at hand?' wrote Yeats in the wake of the First World War.

The rupture in Judeo-Christian civilisation and the accompanying sense of loss which inspired Yeats are every bit as evident in early 21st century Britain as they were in the early 20th century.

If the traditional family and familiar societal structures have been abandoned and there's nothing to replace them, 'what rough beast, its hour come round at last,' asked Yeats in the poem's closing lines, 'slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?'

In Waiting for Godot by Samuel Becket, once voted 'the most significant English language play of the 20th century', two characters sit around waiting endlessly and in vain for God(ot).

Absurd as it sounds, it's clearly less threatening than 'Wanting to be God(ot)'. Because, as   C.S. Lewis wrote in Mere Christianity: 'Out of that hopeless attempt has come nearly all that we call human history—money, poverty, ambition, war, prostitution, classes, empires, slavery—the long terrible story of man trying to find something other than God which will make him happy.'

Whatever the outcome of the current political pantomime we are wise to be mindful of the words of Oliver Cromwell before the Battle of Edgehill (and the youngish pretender wasn't talking talcum powder to his troops), guarded against the Mark of the Beast, and waiting for Christ's Second Coming.

– John Muir, Newnham.