‘We’re still waiting for this election to come alive. The campaign will not catch fire while party leaders insist on ducking the real issues and keeping the electorate at a safe distance’, says Andrew Gilligan in the Telegraph today.
Thus we have more evidence for the assertions made before on this blog, that this election offers nothing new. It is a phoney war, where voters are disengaged from the political class, because the campaign is nothing but an empty charade where the issues that matter to voters have been kept firmly off the table. Gilligan is probably guilty of over analysing what’s happening. He asks:
‘Could it be that, in an election decided in 150 marginals, people are twigging how little influence they have?’
To be honest, few people outside the media corps and the political obsessives club (member, guilty) give any thought to such electoral subtexts. What it boils down to is not the influence of marginal constituencies, but whether or not voters feel there is any point voting in a censored, stage managed and issue-free election. Gilligan demonstrates that the media is starting to get it, but remains baffled by the lack of voter interest when he muses:
Every time I turn on the TV, I seem to find Gordon Brown in some heavily policed council house, sharing a sofa with vetted Labour voters, or Mr Cameron being applauded by a well-scrubbed, carefully multi-ethnic claque of young Tories in T-shirts. To date, there have been no breakthrough moments, no episodes of real spontaneity, only one minor voter ambush – and despite the media verdict that the Tories “won” the first week, they have scored little, if any, dividend in the polls.
And the reason for that is the political class refuses to listen to any of our concerns, leaving us with nothing but a political beauty contest rather than a battle of ideas about the future of this country’s people and Britain’s place in the world. This is what this blog and many others have long predicted. This election is the most sanitised and ideology-free in our history, which is why we can expect collective yawning and mass TV channel changing tonight as Gordon Brown, David Cameron and Nick Clegg ‘debate’ in a format that is more regimented than the North Korean armed forces.
Truth be told, if as much effort went into keeping our hospitals as meticulously free from bugs as this election is free from issues that matter to voters, MRSA, C difficile and Necrotizing fasciitis infections would become things of the past, mere footnotes in the annals of medical history. The political class has destroyed representative democracy because they are not interested in representation, only those things that matter to them.
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AM, You mean we are not in North Korea? And there was I dreaming of escaping to England!
Lord Hailsham was right – we live in an elective dictatorship, so collusion within the political classes destroys democracy. It’s not that the political classes are evil or conspiratorial, so much as dim. They don’t see that consensus stops us from questioning our assumptions and this questioning is where dynamism comes from. They have what ought to be one of the most interesting jobs around and what do they do? They ignore crucial issues and fiddle their expenses. That’s dim.
If Brown was able to pass this election cup he would have done so.
I used to watch the TV news, now I switch off or find an alternative, I am urging all my friends, family and anyone I come into contact with, to vote….of course! – but for none of the above ie, Lib/Lab/Con.
Each and everyone of them (the political elite) needs a good kicking (figuratively speaking of course) and the only way they will ‘get it’ or understand, is via the ballot box.
If this breaks up the old blocks and party allegiances then why not?
Why do we need political parties anyway, they are no longer relevant or listen to us the electorate.
And alas until we escape the clutches of the EU anything we do through the ballot box is rendered useless, even if people are not fully conscious of this fact it subconsciously feeds their apparent election apathy, they can’t be bothered…..and thus the most ‘important election’ will be a sham.
I think the upshot will be a hung Parliament and a ‘real’ election will ensue, where people’s minds have been focused by the issues.
The nation will learn of the true extent of the reparations necessary to merely finance the interest on the ‘black hole’ of national debt – which the British have no true idea of how economically bad it is going to be.
Then the popinjays can stand aside, we are in need of a Churchillian figurehead, a man of destiny, not these lightweight idiots we are encumbered with at this present moment.