The Judge RANTS!
Date: 25/04/10
How Many Cheeks Can One Arse Have?
It may have occurred to you that I haven't uttered a word about the Election yet, and here we are scarcely ten days away from polling day.
Perhaps you think I'm simply being cautious, given that my employment conditions require me to be politically neutral in any official capacity. Or that I'm simply maintaining a lofty and dispassionate stance from which I shall - in due course - pronounce my judgment.
If so, you're welcome. But you're wrong.
It's largely because it is - despite the orgasmic twitterings of the punditocracy - probably the most uninspiring campaign I've ever witnessed. True, unlike - say - 1983, the outcome is not a foregone conclusion; but all the same, there is a complete absence of choice in what is generally on offer to us. The publicity campaigns have been much as expected, emphasising that nebulous concept of 'image' over substance; a continuation of the adman's baleful influence which has emptied our political discourse of its meaning over the last thirty years.
After a period of three or four years in which the stock of politicians has sunk to a level not seen in the lifetimes of any of us, still we see no prospect other than the continuation of the same arrogant isolation, the same sense of near-divine entitlement, the same implication that things will carry on as they are because that's the only way they can ever possibly be. Which we know to be bollocks on a plinth, of course.
But not only do they provide little hope of a change to the system itself, the three 'mainstream' parties give no indication of any substantive differences between them on a whole range of policies. Just to take a f'rinstance: despite the fact that the current economic difficulties have arisen almost totally from the banking sector being able to conduct its affairs like a particularly corrupt casino, all three parties are agreed on one thing above all others; spending on public services must be cut, and cut viciously. So while the bankers get bailed out by billions of pounds of our money (and newly-released figures show that the richest in this country have managed to increase their incomes by a staggering thirty per cent in the last year), essential services that millions of people - most of whom can only dream of increasing their rather less substantial incomes by thirty per cent during their whole lifetimes - rely on will be reduced, removed, or handed over to what are euphemistically termed 'other providers', i.e. corporations or charities.
And if you cut services in this way, it goes without saying that you will be cutting the jobs of the hundreds of thousands who provide them. Unemployment is already over two and a half million (even by the official fiddled figures); what a great way to re-energise a struggling economy by removing hundreds of thousands more incomes from circulation. Although they will almost certainly ameliorate the effect by ensuring that the ever-expanding layers of needless management which has infested the public sector in the last fifteen years is protected from the axe, so that only those on the lowest pay will get the chop and thus have less overall effect on, say, the property market.
The point I'm trying to make here in the immediate context is that the Big Three are all committed to huge cuts. All that differs between them is the timing of those cuts. Labour says next year (and on a scale greater than even the 1980s); the Conservatives say immediately. Even those fluffy Liberal Democrats (of whom more anon) say that they will make cuts at least equal to those promised by the other two. So we have three parties all bursting themselves to do the same thing, and only the timescale is different.
You could run the same pattern across the range of policies: all three parties want the war on the population of Afghanistan and the propping up of its terminally corrupt government to continue; all three want to continue the fawning, uncritical Atlanticism which has blighted foreign and defence policies for over three decades and made us an object of dismay across our own continent; all three insist on continuing with that post-imperial virility symbol, the so-called 'independent nuclear deterrent'; all three are in favour of the increasing invasion of the private sector and its management techniques into publicly-funded services; and all three will - to use a phrase from one of Billy Bragg's songs - "wrap themselves in the Union Jack and just carry on the same" whenever the situation demands it.
This applies just as much to the Lib Dems as it does to the other two. For all the claims to be 'different', 'radical' or 'progressive', the underlying premise of Clegg's party is much the same: unfettered marketism (both the newly-canonised leader and his financial adviser Cable are on the notorious 'Orange Book' wing of the party); privatisation; and some very illiberal views on workers' rights (Cable recently suggested that public sector workers should be banned from taking strike action outright).
But what about their stance on electoral reform? Well, yes, that's been their big selling point since the days of the old SDP-Liberal Alliance (that media-darling agglomeration which enabled the detested Thatcher to get an enormous parliamentary majority in 1983 which her share of the vote did not warrant), but I can't help but wonder whether that policy is simply the result of a desire for electoral advantage and whether - should they get their hands on some of the levers of power at Westminster - their commitment will waver once the existing system (totally discredited as it is, with its defenders now being about as credible as the Catholic cardinals who are busy blaming the current scandals engulfing their Corporation Christi on the media, liberals, gays and Jews) looks like it might work for them after all.
You also have to bear in mind how the Lib Dems actually operate once they do get into power, although this has so far only occurred in the devolved parliaments and on local councils. There seems to be little cohesion on a national scale in what they do in those circumstances. Our own county council has for the last seven years been run by an odd coalition of Lib Dems and various other (mostly independent) groups, and it has certainly been a change for the better when compared to the arrogant one-party Labour state which preceded it. However, I'm well aware that this is not the experience elsewhere, where the Cleggies have formed alliances with some rather unsavoury groups (and not just the Conservative Party, either), and where they have pushed the failed policies of cuts, privatisation and 'outsourcing' just like the other mobs.
For the first time since 1974, we face an election where no-one dare predict the outcome even this close to the day. If the opinion polls are to be believed - although there is no reason to believe them - then we will have an election where the Big Three will end up with a similar proportion of the total vote, at around thirty per cent. Our cock-eyed electoral system, however, means that this will not be reflected in the number of seats won by those parties. Labour could end up being the largest single party, or even having an overall majority, on such a share of votes, whilst the Lib Dems would have scarcely a third of that number of seats on a very similar percentage. Barring some major upheaval in the coming week or so, the Conservatives look to have blown it yet again, but they could still end up as the largest single party, albeit a long way short of a majority.
This election might therefore be the ideal time for a bit of radical action. If you have a credible candidate from outside of the Big Three (and I use the word 'credible' so as automatically to exclude both the Hitler-worshippers of the BNP and their golf club lounge cousins in UKIP), then why not vote for them instead? This would do two things: firstly, it would send a message to all of the Big Three that we wish a plague on all their houses (especially the ones they've been fraudulently claiming expenses on); and secondly, it would reduce the percentage share of the vote of LabConDem still further and throw the crippling deficiencies of the current voting system into sharp relief when any combination of those parties try to claim legitimacy for their term of office. As such, it wouldn't affect the short-term outcome, but it might awaken even the more ovine elements of the electorate into realising that our system is fucked and in need of radical overhaul. That way, we might just start getting somewhere.
