Electioneering

The bi-decennial festival of equivocation, obfuscation and all round bullshit that is the British election is upon us, heralded this year by a series of television debates. The first was between the Prime Ministers and the leader of the opposition. Except it wasn't, as the PM outright refused to partake in anything resembling a one on one debate and what we got instead was two back to back interviews with Jeremy Paxman, a walking advert for the dangers of believing your own hype, and an audience Q and A featuring such hard hitting questions as "Who is your favourite Power Ranger, and you can't say the green one,' and  'Potatoes: roasted or mashed. Discuss.' The whole thing, therefore, could be written off as a colossal waste of time if it wasn't for the incumbent government's frankly bizarre strategy of depicting their opponent as a man so incapable he couldn't relieve himself in the wilderness without pissing on an electric fence. While the meme of Mr Miliband as an awkward dork didn't exactly spring from nowhere - please see literally any interview the guy's ever done -  the Ed as Mr Bean line of attack has been so overplayed that we've now reached a point where 'man answers question reasonably coherently' suddenly becomes a political turnaround on par with Marc Anthony's 'honourable man' speech in Julius Caesar.

Then, of course, we had the multi party debates or - as they were somewhat inevitably referred to - the massed debates, featuring every political leader in the land who A) have  MP's sitting in the House of Commons and B) aren't Northern Irish, because fuck those guys (apparently). 

For those who are A) unfamiliar with British political party leaders B) don't care C) are unable to recognise them from my shitty drawings - l-r we have David Cameron (Conservative), Ed Miliband (Labour), Nichola Sturgeon (Scottish Nationalist), Leanne Wood (Plaid Cymru), Nigel Farage (UKIP), Nick Clegg (Liberal Democrats) and Natalie Bennett (The Green Party)

Two observations about the gratuitous mass debating have already been discussed by far cleverer people than me at great length: that 1) when the full range of mainstream political opinion is given a platform it quickly becomes apparent that the UK is a lot more left wing than a perusal of The Sun would have you believe, and that 2) it's generally nice to see more XX chromosomes on the podium. For me though, the takeaway is - again -  how significantly our expectations have been lowered with regards to public discourse in this country. That UKIP's Mr Farage, a man who couldn't be more of a spiv if he grew a pencil moustache and began operating a coconut shy, and the physical embodiment of the sort of received wisdom that ascertains that Jews can hear gold and that Asian ladies have sideways fannies - is welcomed by the media as some sort of rebel voice, while Nichola Sturgeon, the leader of a reasonably progressive party with a solid record of competent governance, is regarded as a dangerous unknown quantity, depresses me more than I can articulate at present.

The other point I would make is that British politics has become so fractured that the first past the post system we currently implement is fundamentally broken. But that is rant for another time.

With regards to the above scribblings, I feel I should apologise to any supporters of Ms Bennett, who generally speaking, I have some time for. At the risk of explaining the joke, her line is a reference to a recent car crash interview in which she lapsed into an embarrassed silence when asked to cost some of her policies and later blamed this on a case of the sniffles.  

I also apologise for the reduction of complex political positions to infantile soundbites (although what's good for the goose...). I am to political satire what farting in the bath is to perfumery

Love and Fishes

Dave Denton