I was with Jimmy Neary of the famous Neary’s food store in Helmshore at a barbecue on Saturday night.

Our conversation centred on the General Election and consisted of me pontificating, and Jimmy rapidly putting me back in my box.

Jimmy made his point Clinton style, ‘It’s the economy, stupid’.

Finally I have to concede it’s all right me going on about the candidate who can do the best for the constituency, and who really cares about the people.

However, what this election is really about is which of the main parties do you trust to sort out the economy?

It doesn’t matter if your party’s candidate is a lazy wooden top, you are ultimately voting for a party not an individual. Politicians chunter on about the size of the national debt. Well, let me try to quantify that for you.

Every man, woman and child in this country, as a member of UK Plc, owes £25k each - and that’s growing by the day.

We need a real leader to sort this mess out. However, don’t be conned by the lads spouting on about efficiency savings, because that’s classic politician’s tosh!

They don’t have a clue, you need people like Jimmy from the real world to sort out stuff like that.

We have eight candidates standing in Rossendale and I think I’ve had leaflets off all of them. Indeed one has swamped us with leaflets, presumably to prove they are better or have more money to blow than their rivals. They all have a central theme in common – they make unattractive reading, being a mix of misleading half-truths, self-righteous claims, and self-congratulatory trumpet blowing.

All skirt around the real issues and underline just how shallow political debate has become in this country.

What astounds me is how little of the new modern social mediums our candidates have embraced.

Thanks to Tony Swain (a very, very good IT man), I am now a twitter fanatic. I’m ‘following’ (twitter speak) Alastair Campbell (very good and witty), William Hague, and numerous other notable political figures.

As for our local candidates, there’s zilch.

And their feeble web efforts fare little better. Barrack Obama put much of his electoral success down to his campaign manager David Plouffe’s brilliant use of the internet and other social media.

Our candidates probably don’t read the same books as me, mainly because they are too busy folding leaflets!

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