From The Archive: Election Special

From The Archive is a special Friday feature. It features posts from my earlier (now-deleted) blog: Stuff & Nonsense and a few items from previous versions of A Tangled Rope that I feel deserve reprinting here, mainly as a way of archiving them. The dates are only approximate, I’m afraid, and there is a possibility that some links may no longer work (although, I will try to remember to test the links before republishing the piece).

Election Special - 03/05/05

If anything, this was supposed to be a literary blog, talking about the world of literature and letters, and about, and featuring, my writing. However, I have a habit of being easily distracted, for the last few weeks, mainly by the current general election. This election is a bore, but thankfully, it will all be over soon.

However, on the subject of the election, I read this a couple of days ago:

It seems hard to believe that the hordes of pollsters, image consultants and television producers, the frenetic chase around the country and the constant exposure of one stunt after another can really have made for an election duller than that in which Mr and Mrs Atlee trundled around the country in their family saloon, he with his crossword, she with her knitting. But it is true. The reason is not hard to find. In between filling in his crossword, Atlee was fighting for 'the establishment of a Socialist Commonwealth of Great Britain', as the Labour manifesto promised. The contrast with modern elections is not merely that it is hard to imagine Cherie Blair knitting, but that the more fuss campaigns make the less they have to say. The fleets of buses, the chartered trains, the camera crews and satellite dishes, the cascades of balloons, the soaring campaign theme songs, are deployed in the service of more and more similar objectives. No one seeks the creation of a socialist commonwealth any more. With the end of ideological conflict, instead of being offered a choice of philosophies the voters were being offered a choice of managers. When Atlee faced Churchill in 1945, some 73 per cent of the electorate turned out to vote. When they clashed again in 1950 and 1951, the proportion rose even higher, to well over 80 per cent. Yet, in the 2001 election, the number voting fell to below 60 per cent for the first time since the election held in December 1918. Curiously, the turnout was highest in places where people found it hardest to get to the polling stations, like Brecon or Galloway, while in parts of inner-city Liverpool, Manchester or Leeds, where polling stations were within walking distance, half - even, in one constituency, two-thirds - of those who could have voted simply didn't bother to do so. There is a way of construing this indifference as a good thing. It might, conceivably, be the sign of a healthy society: people who are relatively happy with their lot may not feel impelled to go out and vote. It might, perhaps, reflect a recognition of the declining powers of the national parliament. But what it clearly demonstrates is the paradox that those who are most dependent on the state seem to have the least engagement with it.

From: The Political Animal - Jeremy Paxman, talking about the 2001 General Election.

If anything, it seems to have got worse for this election, and there are all the signs that as the parties further hone their marketing strategies, and have even less to say, and as the gaps between them narrow even further as they concentrate even more on the centre ground, this trend will continue for the foreseeable future. [BTW, I've read nearly half of the above book, and I do recommend it if you've ever read anything else by the great Paxman, or if you ever wonder what politicians are for.]

There was supposed to be something new - and interesting - about the current election, though. This election had been claimed as the first election where blogs would make some kind of difference. But what that difference is - beyond mostly sneering at the opposition parties, and the mainstream media - we have yet to see.

Of course, there are some good political blog and a few excellent ones, but most of them have suffered from the same difficulties as what they like to call the MSM, a lack of anything of real substance to write about.

During this election, most of the political blogs have become the online equivalent of the Sealed Knot and other such societies that exist to re-create the battles of yesteryear. Blogs of the right and left still appear to be fighting the quaint old class wars of the 19^th and 20^th centuries. I could have sworn I saw one right-wing blog call Tony Blair a socialist - really, how quaint can you get?

Reading the majority of the political blogs - at times - seemed almost akin to stepping back into the muddy fetid trenches of the class wars of the 70s and early 80s. But then, as the Labour party has already dumped its socialist past, and the Conservatives will have to dump their more rabid free-market, anti-immigration, anti-EU, anti-modern world dinosaurs too if they are going to survive past the beginning of the 21^st century, it seems as though the blogs will be the only place to see these unreconstructed political obsessives in something akin to their natural habitat - boring all and sundry at the local political club bar.

A far more knicker-wettingly exciting prospect for politicians, their whores and groupies will be the fate of all three major party leaders from Friday onwards.

Blair is the easy one. Once he has outdone his spiritual mother - the blessed Margaret - and beaten her record of days in office he will feel he has proved something - even if only in the narrow confines of his own mind - and make way for Brown at long last. For those of us who vote Labour in spite of Blair, and not because of him, it will be a day of quiet relief.

All in all, Kennedy has been a failure for the Lib Dems, seemingly unable to capitalize on all the gifts he has been given by the woeful inadequacies of the other two parties. At times, he seems to be becoming a kind of invisible man, the more you see of him the less there seems to be of him. He seems - at times to be lost and out of his depth, even in the shallows of this campaign. The Lib Dems too have fallen victim to the ideological timidity and lack of vision that seems to permeate the entire current crop of parties. So, their claim of being a real alternative is as hollow as a very hollow thing indeed.

Even the loony parties: Respect, UKIP, Greens and so on and on and on - can only define themselves by what - usually single-issue - they are against, rather than offering any kind of vision of society in their particular bright and shiny future.

Then there is Michael Howard - oh dear. Deary, deary me. I never used to believe it, dismissing it as something akin to an Old Wives Tale, but my jaw really did drop on the day the Tories announced her would be taking over as their leader. Major, Hague, IDS - then Howard. It seemed that the party was so intent on reaching further and further into the barrel that by the time they were scraping their collective fingernails on the barrel bottom in order to grasp at Howard they were so deep inside that barrel they'd completely lost touch with the outside world. In retrospect, it is hardly surprising that the barrel has tipped over and is now rolling off down the hill accelerating towards electoral oblivion.

The simple answer is that politics has failed. All its great utopian schemes - of right and left - have floundered in the face of reality, leaving us with at best this dull grey managerialism. After the failures of the 20^th century, it seems unlikely that any utopian vision will ever be able to survive the cynicism and doubt of the people. Maybe the bland empty faces of Blair, Major, Bush Clinton - promising nothing but more of the same, but in a slightly different suit - are the faces of our political future.

If you want a picture of the future, imagine a grey man in his underpants eating peas FOREVER!