Are You a Gob or Are You a Git?

It's 2023 and democracy is an enfeebled old man in the toilet, simultaneously wiping its arse with the constitution and spaffing into a hankie about how great it is. But you can't decide whether you are engaged in the whole process or not? Find out with our easy quiz. 

Definitions and introductory notes

The Test

When politicians come to canvas for your vote, do you?

1. Get your mates to hold the crypto-fascists down as you superglue "Enemy of Planet Earth" rosettes to their foreheads? | 5
2. Invite them in, give them a cup of tea and talk to them at length about local issues like the dog-turd situation and the closure of St. Crispin's Centre for the Voluntarily Wasted? | 2
3. Nod politely as you work out a way of asking them if they can pop down the shop to buy you some chocolate and Rizlas? | 0

Plans are published to build a toxic waste dump in what is currently your kitchen. Do you?

1. Compliantly move into the lounge on the condition that the contractors make your dinner? | 2
2. Start a pressure group to resite the facility in the kitchen of a poorer family who will be grateful for the jobs, and the wider economic benefits brought by the toxic waste industry? | 4
3. Make a protest camp with aerial walkways joining the cooker hob with the top of the kitchen cabinets, while teams of expert tunnellers barricade themselves into the oven and washing machine? | 6

An abattoir for a major supermarket ritually humiliates turkeys for fun before they are killed for Christmas. Do you?

1. Cook the meat a little longer to remove the bitterness? | 0
2. Break into the supermarket one night to liberate the frozen turkeys. | 4
3. Have a word with the contractors operating the toxic waste dump in your kitchen and mention you "feel like chicken tonight". | 1

How Did You Score?

11–15 Anarchist

It's obvious that you are a shifty and deceitful, tree-hugging trouble maker with clear issues of personal hygiene to work through, a look-at-me hairstyle that marks you out as a clown, and a gittish knack of over-gesturing with your hands in an effort to look reasonable when you are forced to explain yourself to the authorities.

Confused by a combination of recreational fungi abuse and bewildering, subsonic bass loops, your beliefs that Terence McKenna was an alien, or that the world can be saved through the medium of dance music, are sadly too simplistic and wrong-headed for even the Government to believe.

If you devoted less time to dancing like a helicopter, had a good shave and spent your trust fund more wisely on better drugs, you would quickly turn into the hedonistic scum you so despise.

6–10 Partly Political

Your endearing, misguided belief in democracy is touching but flawed. On the one hand, you are a committed local campaigner, tirelessly fighting to save services available within 100m of your lounge. On the other hand, you are a selfish twit tirelessly fighting to close all the other facilities to keep your taxes low, or to enable your property to rise in value by £1000 before lunch is served.

Your children are important to you, which is why you drive them the 67yds from your home to their classroom in a bullet-proof, half-track Mercedes Benz Humvee, slowing down only to drive over the still-twitching carcase of that "busybody school crossing attendant".

You flicker between states of apathy and anarchy on a daily basis, but your pattern of thought is dictated by one factor: Is it in my backyard?

0-5 Apathetic

Congratulations on being politically interested enough to accommodate four mouse-clicks into your busy, believe-nothing lifestyle. You must be feeling very proud of yourself.

However, you are still a lazy, mindless, facile blob of animal mash who subsists on a spoon-fed diet of tabloid opinions and daytime soap opera. As an evolutionary measure, your tepid consciousness, unable to maintain political thought, assumes a holding pattern based on the opinions of the last sexually attractive person who wasn't physically ill in your presence.

As a consequence, any convictions that make it to the cerebral cortex of your brain can be easily swamped by the dizzying cocktail of glandular secretions triggered by something as low-level, and apparently meaningless, as a cheese and pickle sandwich.

Well done. It's people like you who make this country what it is.