Stupefied

I have checked out of the whole blogging business for the past couple of weeks as there are only so many ways of phrasing the utter transferability of all of the main candidates in this election.  When your average non-politics geek says dismissively that they’re ‘all the same’ they’re pretty much right.  At least you used to be able to choose between the ‘socialist lot’, the ‘capitalist-ish lot’ and the ‘woolly lot in the background, somewhere’.  These days you have the career politicians representing the three sides of a metaphysical three-sided social democratic coin, each distinguishable solely by the colour of their tie.  And I have to admit that I have recently switched right off to the point of not being able to write about anything else either.   

There were so many elephants in the room in the leader debates I could’ve sworn one of them was asking questions. The biggest and smelliest pachyderm was that of the scale and nature of the inevitable public spending cuts we are destined to endure.  That they are to happen is not argued by anyone; but no party has come even close to disclosing how they are going to find the cash to plug the self-collapsing vortex in the public ledger.  In fact the first question of the final debate was on just that very point, and the answers were a hypocritical mindboggle. All three were eager to criticise each others’ figures and emphasise the resulting strife of said cuts on the lives of ‘hard-working families’, all the while cooperating with each other in not discussing the sheer scale of the problem they (and therefore we) are facing.  To do so would have shown the economic policies within their respective manifestos to be the fictions that they are: all due to be torn up within a week of the election, when presumably the structural deficit of 160-odd billion will suddenly become apparent and a sight more pressing.

Ah well, only a few more days to go before we get back to mostly-lies rather than total-lies.

 

On a LPUK party note, I’m off to Sutton and Cheam on Thursday as one of Martin Cullip’s designated ‘observers’: where I get to see the majesty of democracy up close – which ought to be good.  At least I get to spend the occasion with a decent candidate, even if I can’t find one to vote for.