It’s not often that I get to say this, but it’s all been happening in Crewe. In recent memory, only when a toxic cloud threatened to envelop everyone’s favourite railway junction has there been such interest in my home town, and I’m rather enjoying it.
You see, we were Labour’s last stand and an opportunity for the Tories to make their first by-election gain in over 25 years. As a result, I was bombarded with leaflets and propaganda from all three main parties, and it made me despair.
We all know elections are Serious Business. Over Easter, before the announcement of the by-election, I received a leaflet due to my recent eligibility to vote. But not just any leaflet, oh no. That wouldn’t make a very good start to a paragraph. It was a leaflet from the slightly oxymoronic Conservative Future, the Tories’ youth branch, and it seemed to think that as a “young person”, I would find the idea of politics being ‘fun’ an appealing one.
I didn’t mind that it was from the Conservatives; I’d like to think that this mass-emailed, de-personalised leaflet was written with the best of intentions and represented an uncynical view towards newly eligible voters’ interest in politics. I resented the insulting insinuation that if something wasn’t ‘fun’ then I wouldn’t, as a ‘young person’, be interested.
For less removed examples of this you just have to look at the recent student elections. A hee-larious costume was seemingly a requirement for success, although this vacuous ideology did give rise to an amazing exchange in one of my lectures ending with the impassioned cry: “who wants to hear about DRINKING?” which was thankfully roundly ignored by all in the room.
Boris Johnson’s victory in the London mayoral election further shows how politics has become far less serious and more about who can shout ‘I’M FUN’ at the top of their voice most often. Here, a man who casually tosses out references to ‘watermelon smiles’ and being ‘down with the ethnics’ has been elected to a reasonably high public office.
In Hartlepool, a man in a monkey costume has won two consecutive mayoral elections. These are dark days indeed.
It’s not just the increasingly patronising messages to voters that are of concern, though. It’s the partisanism, best illustrated by the baying and braying of the House of Commons. With all the crowing bravado of the newly-laid, these elected, supposedly right honourable people pounce on the slightest mistake by their ‘opponents’. Aside from Gordy’s half-hearted attempt to form a ‘government of all the talents’, party politics is as rife with childish mud-slinging as ever.
The vapid attack earlier this year on Harriet Harman for supposedly showing fear by wearing a stab vest in central London highlights this. Of course she wasn’t in danger; she was flanked by police officers the entire time. No mugger was going to attack her. And if someone went for her on the basis of her position, well, that’s irrelevant to public safety in London, because the public is not Harriet Harman.
The leaflets sent out by campaigning parties for the by-election have followed a similarly puerile line which only serves to deepen the divisions, castigating other parties for their perceived failures while adamantly refusing to recognise their own. Labour’s was also fairly mawkish, centring on the late Gwyneth Dunwoody’s popularity, her daughter’s candidacy and rather little else.
You can also take the petulant storm-out staged by the main candidates for Mayor of London upon Richard Barnbrook, BNP candidate extraordinaire, taking the podium. This legitimises the BNP’s argument that they’re denied a voice by the media and other parties because they’re scared, which by extension gives credence to some of the rest of their vile claims.
Part of me thinks that making politics ‘fun’ and focusing more on flashy smiles and slick suits might attract younger voters, and that this might be a good thing. That’s not the part that’s winning though.
Whether or not Gordon Brown has a personality or John Prescott is articulate has no bearing on their suitability for office; politics is about a literacy of ideas and working to improve the country, not pathetic personal attacks.
