Sunday 15th February

Are we so stupid that Politics has to be reduced to a photo of Ed Milliband struggling to eat a bacon sandwich, or whether a pink bus is actually cerise or magenta or just pink, or a beauty contest in the guise of a Leader’s debate.  Well, maybe we are, because I find it increasingly difficult to find any real discussion or analysis of policies.  Or even more importantly what and who the respective parties are fighting for, what their motives are, what their ethos, what do they even believe they can begin to achieve in the five years we are supposed to be giving power to them.

And ridicule is now used as a weapon by both sides, with personal insults about people’s appearance or which school they went to, rather than what they might actually be saying.  Amazingly things have gotten worse with 24 hour news channels.  They seize on the latest sound-bites and have a constant scrolling banner proclaiming breaking news which is anything but, yet spend very little time actually looking at the policies or trying to give us some insights into the different parties.

Opinion polling is another game, where any poll out of line with the average is seized upon as evidence of a shift in the public’s voting intention, when at best they are educated guesses made by extrapolating hastily answered questions (often by phone) of a very small sample of the population.  All the experts admit that polling is only ever an indication and can be out by 3 or 4 percent either way.  The truth is that under our very undemocratic system the majority of seats will not change hands, and all the parties are concentrating on either defending or attacking their marginals.  Often the actual ‘result’ of a general election is decided by a couple of hundred thousand voters in these few seats.

And the biggest shame of all is the low turnout.  Especially among the young.  And this is of course largely a result of the trivialization of Politics; the less the big issues are aired, discussed and seen to be relevant to ordinary people’s lives the more those people will switch off.  Literally too; the ‘News’ used to be watched by far more people when we only had a handful of channels.  Now it is possible and all too easy to just watch news-free channels all the time.  How many people out there won’t even be aware that an election will be taking place at all?  And no wonder if all our media can talk about is the colour of a bus, or to endlessly show out-takes of politicians caught off-guard.