Stumbling towards the finish line

One day to go to Polling Day and it is hard not to conclude that the official duration of a General Election campaign in the UK [is it six weeks?] is the absolute maximum that any sane individual can possible stomach.

It’s a coin toss as to whether the political class regards an election campaign as the life blood of democracy, the thing that races their motor more than anything else, or just a brief distraction from … er … being the political class. Against the background, of course, that technically their jobs are on the line.

When you consider firstly the main Parties’ efforts, i.e. the campaign strategies; the contributions of the policy wonks, researchers and manifesto writers; the bringing in of funding; the keeping everyone ‘on message’; the closing down of cock-ups; the monitoring of their opponents, the leafleting, the door-stepping, the rallies, the set piece official statements, the fudging, the denials and the individual ordeals of going on television and radio and saying as little as possible whilst avoiding directly answering any questions put to them.

Then secondly, on top, the entire attendant chaotic mass-media orgy that surrounds the process from start to finish, with consultants, academics, think tank experts and pollsters pontificating ad nauseam and presenters paying lip service to staying within the ‘impartiality’ rules whilst revelling in their ‘open season’ opportunity to make names for themselves by laying into (or tripping up) every last Tom, Dick and Harry put up to represent their Party and its supposed policies … especially when random external current affairs events seemingly blow off course the best-laid plans of mice and men … it is difficult to alight upon a description that does justice to the whole.

Well, apart perhaps from ‘unedifying’ and/or ‘exhausting’.

It is generally accepted that at some point this Friday either Mrs May or Mr Corbyn will be declared Prime Minister of the country, ostensibly for the next – very crowded, intense and important – five years.

What I have found fascinating, and not necessarily in a good way, is how the Tory and Labour Parties can have such divergent views on what is going on in this country and how best to take it (and us) forward.

It’s one thing when the Lib-Dems, UKIP, the Greens et al. can put to the public the most inventive, creative and la-la-land policies and promises ever to have been devised by man because, of course, everyone knows that they’re never going to have the opportunity to put them into effect, or indeed be held accountable after they have.

It’s a well-recognised backwater of the political elite to which some people gravitate precisely because of that fact. They want to be players in ‘the game’ but without any responsibility. It’s an ‘easy’ option for politicos of neither substance nor gravitas to take. They get the chance to broadcast their ideas to the nation from time to time – be seen to be part of the political elite – without any adverse consequences.

Better to travel hopefully than to arrive, as Robert Louis Stevenson didn’t quite say.

However, on the subject of police resources (in the wake of the Manchester and London Bridge terrorist attacks) – to take one pertinent example – we get the spectacle of Mrs May, who served (is it?) seven years as Home Secretary, and the Tory Party denying absolutely that the security services and police have been too severely cut back and/or left fundamentally under-resourced to deal with the current ongoing ‘threat’.

This when, on the face of it (and the sheer statistics and numbers) it seems patently obvious that ‘security’ resources have been systematically depleted since 2010.

Labour go on the attack, pointing out that black is black – and the Tories come back with the answer that no it isn’t, it’s actually white and that anyway in the past Labour did or said ‘this and that’, to which Labour reply either “No we bloody didn’t” and/or “But that’s not the point!”

Then, on the other hand, we have Labour  – underscored by its mantra “For the Many, not the Few” – promising to spend more on education, on public service pay increases, the NHS, paying off student loans, and any number of additional other worthy things … (if we’re being honest) few, if not none, of them particularly offensive to any bog-standard man (or woman) on the Clapham omnibus as theoretical ‘nice to haves’ … and fending off jibes about its perennial supposed weak spot of ‘economic competency’ by doing its best to both cost and show how it would pay for said items, (presumably) via borrowing and then taxation etc.

And yet. Pardon me for raising it, but isn’t there an inconsistency or gap in logic here?

Mr Corbyn is apparently gaining huge traction amongst young people at the moment by ending austerity, promising to do away with student loans etc. and ‘build for the future’ – but surely [and I don’t wish to sound like a Tory Party supporter here] borrowing most if not all the money required to pay for these ‘goodies’ is tantamount to postponing the paying for them somewhere down the line – with said (presumably massive) bill eventually to be picked up in one form or another by the very ‘young people’ who are currently getting behind Mr Corbyn and his policies in their droves, i.e. when they get to be middle-aged … and, if not them, probably future generations yet to be conceived.

It’s a vision that is a bit short-term, isn’t it?

(And, you might argue, an approach not altogether different from President Trump’s decision to pull America out of the Paris Accord on climate change – a case of “Sod the future, that’s somebody else’s problem!”).

Simon Campion-Brown is unwell.