Well if I was feeling depressed about the general election campaign when it started how do I feel now? Well that is the simple part – worse. The hard part is why? Why is it that after all the money spent, the hours of new coverage and pointless studio debates about this and that nothing has changed my original melancholia?
I wish I had a simple answer to this – I don’t. I think it is partly due to the sickening sight of politicians of each party pretending that they are great and the others are, well, mad, bad or dangerous to know. They try to find clear blue water between themselves when all the time the people are not listening. I suspect that most people don’t understand the great ideas being put forward and don’t care. What they care about is honesty or at least some semblance of honesty. To date there has been precious little of this – instead we have had evasion, platitudes and spin. The
Labour and
Lib Dems are broke so they are fighting for the free publicity that the news channels provide. The
Tories, on the other hand, are very well financed, in part by a dodgy character who happens to be a Lord. I was in Nottingham yesterday, which is surrounded by
marginal seats, and every billboard had a Tory poster attacking Gordon Brown. There were no Labour or Lib Dem posters, just Tory, so I suspect this is an example of just how rich/poor their perspective campaigns are. But was it effective? I doubt it. The advertising campaign doesn’t really mean any change – it just trying to sell the idea of replacing a worn out and thread bare group of politicians with a group who probably will make the same mess of it that the last bunch has. No change, or rather no real change there.
So what would be a really significant result? Well I suppose if the Tories win with a large enough majority to govern a full term is on scenario. Another would be that no party got an overall majority – the so called hung parliament. However, perhaps the best/worse outcome would either of the above but with a really low turn out. If this happened then no one would really have a mandate to do anything and then they might actually ask why is that no one cares? Why is it in the so called ‘mother or parliaments’ so few of the population thought it worth while voting? Now this would really be a crises and out of the crisis we might get real change.
So what would this change look like? Well making politicians accountable for one. I once worked in a department whose main job was to get funding from the central government. This was a labyrinthine problems as the funding came from different departments, each demanding their own funding applications, statistical returns and so on. What this lead to was a hugely distorted process as non elected officials handed out grants from London. Not one of their decisions was locally accountable. In the end it turned into a bad episode of
Yes Minister. This is what is on offer. (
I know the Tories are offering more locally accountably but you have to remember that it was under the Tories in the 80’s that a lot of the centralisation took place so I think I am right to be suspicious).
Another change item would be to make Parliament more representative of the way people have voted. Currently we a ruled by any party that can get about 40-41% of the vote. This means that the majority can be ignored. How is this far? We also have a corrupt second chamber (By corrupt I mean the process of selection rather than the individuals – although some of them are dubious).
The third change would be to reinvigorate local government. Make them much more accountable for what they do. Also give them back the funding taken by central government – this again would require significant changes to the way that councillors are elected. We should also make greater strides to opening up the whole apparatus of local government to political accountability.
Will any of this happen? I have no idea – however, I know that if things stay the same then we will become more and more cynical and this is really bad for the country. Cynicism is one of the ways that fringe parties start to get a hold of the political process – not a good idea.
Simon Marchini LRPS
Simon's Blog 