I agree with the abstract concept known as “Nick”…and other election stories.

It would appear that no one followed my good advice on avoiding the election campaign. I’m a bit shocked but I’m alright. You’ll recall my contention that Johnny come-lately and pals shouldn’t skewer the result with their light touch understanding of the issues. If you’d spent five years locked in a room with a rag-tag collection of misfits, arguing about the future of the country, would you really want some bastard coming in at the last moment, catching the end of the conversation and declaring a winner?

We’re told that it’s good for our democracy that more people are “engaged” during the campaign, but for large swathes of the population, the call to arms is too late, both for them personally and for the political parties who are making the call – after all the politicos have ignored these same people in the space between elections. They in turn have been ignored. In any event enormous chunks of the population know nothing of the subjects they’re being asked to vote on. If someone came up to you and said “excuse me sir, I’m writing a biography on Albert Camus but I can’t proceed without your approval. Would you mind reading my notes and seeing if you agree with my take on the man?”, you’d say it was great to be asked, but perhaps you needed to do a little research before you could comment.

Before you send me hate messages engraved into dark chocolates with a smooth coffee liquor centre and a nice little card with “Hi Ed, hope you’re having a great election” written on it, try to not wilfully misunderstand my argument. Amongst the many things I don’t have in common with T.S Eliot, is a hatred of universal suffrage. Of course everyone should vote – and yes, why not 16 year olds – if I can fuck them, I want to know what they think (I attended a pre-election debate in which several elderly members of the audience cried foul at the mention of this idea on the grounds that “they don’t pay tax” – so presumably these misers think the unemployed, the very low paid and deceased shouldn’t be able to vote either – the lunatics). My argument is simply that your right to vote is a huge responsibility and you should understand the potential consequences of each choice available to you. That means knowing a bit about politics – i.e. more than “they’re all the same though aren’t they?” or “I like Mr Cameron because he’s got a nice family and seems to know what he’s talking about.”

For most of the electorate, they’ve got four weeks to understand the complexities of economics, education, health, defence and the constitution, and they’re learning from scratch. Some may finger a national newspaper, which more often than not will obfuscate matters further. Many more turn to Television and are rewarded with a discussion framed on the parties’ terms. If Jeremy Paxman threw a curveball during his interview with David Cameron by asking him, “So, this big society bullshit aside, tell us which political thinkers are most important to you and how they’ve informed party policy under your leadership” then you’d have an interview worthy of the name; a conversation that may actually tell you something worth knowing. I realise that might be intellectualising the debate a little but WE’RE CHOSING A FUCKING GOVERNMENT. If we insist on everything being simplified we can hardly complain when politicians talk to us like we’re drooling vegetables. In today’s Times there was an interesting aside on Nick Cleggover’s debate preparations. Apparently Clegg has been rehearsing since November under the tutelage of former Sky News anchor Scott Chisholm. Chisholm’s advice to Clegg? “When you address the public on television, imagine you’re talking to a group of ten year olds.” When you watch tonight’s debate and think, “Clegg’s the only one who’s making sense”, consider that you’re living up to the Chisholm doctrine that you’re thick as shit and corn flour.

I’ve sat in my own filth and watched as the polls tell us that the electorate are getting “involved” in the debate and are now excited by Nick Clegg, a shiny new talisman whose transformative potential may renew the country and presage the dawn of a second British Empire. What mallets my manmeat about this is that until last Thursday, half the country had no idea who Nick Clegg was. Ninety minutes later, having heard him say not a lot with great confidence and nothing since, they felt they knew enough to give Clegg their vote (at least notionally). It’s as simple as that is it? One wonders why the parties bother with the media during a parliament at all. The media have done Clegg’s campaigning for him in the last 7 days, allowing him to relax and polish off those Battlestar Galactica boxsets he’s been meaning to watch. I’m pleased for Nick of course – it’s great TV, but where’s the detail on his programme for government?

As someone who will be voting Liberal Democrat, you’d think I’d be pleased by this change in the party’s fortunes but it’s a little like winning an argument with an idiot. Sure, you’ve prevailed but you didn’t win because of the intellectual vigour you brought to the conversation, rather the ignorance of the other party. You need tossers to win but at what cost to the discourse?

Clegg didn’t have to work very hard to win his debate with Cameron and Brown, they were hopeless. Cameron looked like he might have been wearing an earpiece with an aid telling him “David, try not to look alarmed but there’s a boy at the main gate who says you’ve touched him and he wants to talk to the press.” Brown was judged to have “lost” because his performance was stilted and uncomfortable, as if Brown’s on screen charisma had ANYTHING TO DO WITH HIS ABILITY TO GOVERN WHATSOEVER. Broadly speaking I’m on Clegg’s side. It doesn’t even bother me that he talks in slogans or that his conviction has a barcode on it. I’m not even vexed at him being an archetypal professional politician and as such, less a man and a more a set of abstract concepts wrapped in skin. But for me the election debates have crystallised the problem that occurs more generally over the lifetime of a parliament, namely that the popularity of the individual becomes more important than the basis upon which their beliefs are founded ; their ability to communicate on television is more important than an analysis of their policies and the institutions they are deferential toward and therefore ideologically programmed not to change (*takes deep breath*) and worst of all, their current standing in the polls becomes the story – and it seems, in terms of voting intension, a self-fulfilling prophesy in which the minutiae of the issues becomes an afterthought.

What’s that you say, this new level of coverage is a long overdue corrective? Not without equal scrutiny it isn’t, it’s hype.

Of course you could argue that greater media coverage for the Liberals was always likely to shore up their support, but Clegg should have to sing harder for his supper, rather than trading on apparent dissatisfaction with the old two party system. One comment I read on Facebook summed up the more sanctimonious side to Liberalism, validated by the poll surge, with one person posting “Now you know why I’ve always voted Liberal” the morning after the debate. Ah yes, you agree with me now so I invite you to reflect on how intelligent I am for having backed them when it wasn’t fashionable and how stupid you are for not having seen it my way in the first place. Glad you finally caught up. Were it not an act of intellectual and moral capitulation to vote for the Tories, it might be worth it just to challenge that sort of vacuity.

Democratic collateral damage

I suppose you could argue that given the democratic deficit built into the electoral system, an undemocratic result – which we always get in one form or another, is the norm. See for example, this hilarious result from the 1983 election in which first past the post disenfranchised half the country.

1983 Election Result	Votes	Percentage of Votes	Seats Won
Conservative	13,012,316	42.3	397
Labour	8,456,934	27.6	209
SDP – Liberal Alliance	7,780,949	25.4	23

That result was a grade A democratic cataclysm but ironically, as it begins to look as if parliament might actually half reflect vote share, the legitimacy of the potential result is being called into question. Oh really, you say? Surely a hung parliament is a great result for everyone? Well, no. Because there’s a difference between vote share and voting intension. If I vote Liberal Democrat as I surely will unless Ken Clarke succeeds in scaring me into joining the Cameroons, then I may do so without endorsing a lib-lab pact. The result becomes open to interpretation and all sorts of problems ensue, driven by real questions about how power should be divided as no mandate has been given. It is now a realistic possibility that Brown could come third in the popular vote but hold on to the largest share of seats because of the Labour bias in the system. What does Clegg do then? The man who advocates fairness could end up keeping the losers in office. That would be the democratic equivalent of Dennis Potter’s Brimstone and Treacle, with Clegg in the Devil’s role, raping the system in order to restore it to health. Remember to say your prayers at the ballot box.

Just one idea on the table and it’s THIS?

The Election so far has been entertaining, if not politically rewarding. I loved Cameron’s invitation to join the Government of Britain, his so called “Big Society”. I watched the manifesto launch and felt like C.D Bales in Roxanne – meeting the mayor in the street with a cow tethered to his arm and listening to him tell me that the gimmick for the town would be “teaching the cow to drink a beer”. Yes, thought I, “he took the idea ripe off the tree, he plucked it and he put it in his pocket. Is it, dare I say genius? No, no, but maybe it is? Maybe I’m in the presence of greatness and I just don’t know it yet – but I saw it!”

The fact that this is Team Cameron’s big idea for the campaign, tells you how empty that Tory think tank must have been. How long did they stare at that blank sheet of paper? Most commentators agree that it’s quite a clever pitch – big government has run out of money so hand power to the people and let them govern themselves in small co-operative enclaves, after all, nothing is more democratic than self-interest, er, right? Perhaps some people will be left to rot, you know, the poor, the hated, the kids that didn’t get picked for football in the playground – but fuck’em, they can always form their own group and if they choose not to, because they’re disenfranchised, uneducated and have no interest in civic virtue – good, we’ve got our own sphere of interest here and we don’t need society’s filth clogging the pipe of progress.

So there’s all those positives to consider but The Big Society, and it could be so very big, is also a neat distraction from the question of what a Tory government might do on the occasions where the devolution of power to the village hall wasn’t appropriate or desirable, you know, most times. The Big Society, bigger than any you’ve ever seen, allows Cameron to bat the question back to the man in the street and say “Nevermind that, what are YOU going to do?” The answer David, is that I’m going to vote for someone else.

Anyone who wants to feel a little better about hating this idea, given its democratic pretensions, could do worse than read Jonathan Raban’s review of “Red Tory” in the London Review of Books.

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v32/n08/jonathan-raban/camerons-crank

For those of you that can’t be arsed, the keys points are,

• The Big Society is informed by Phillip Blonde’s book, rooted in pastoral nostalgia for an England of “small farms, artists’ and writers’ rose-trellised cottages, shops, workshops, churches and pubs.” In other words, the bastard child of Kent and Cornwall – those two powerhouses of progressive thought.
• The core of his ideas are neither new nor radical, as Cameron would tell you, but can be traced back to G.K. Chesterton, Hilaire Belloc, and their 1929 Catholic Distributist League manifesto.
• Cameron’s confusion as to how these principles might be applied to 21^st century Britain are as confused as Blonde’s, showcased in the vague language he’s used to sell the idea and,
• Belloc, the co-author of the idea which has morphed into the philosophy underpinning the Conservative manifesto, was an admirer of fascist Italy and despised democratically elected parliaments.

So there you have it – vote Conservative and Cameron will modernise you back to the 1920’s – further if you consider 19^th century volunteerism – you know, that thing which pre-dates pernicious 20^th century abominations like the welfare state. Confusing isn’t it? You think you’re voting for the future when it fact, the only ideas on the table are those from 100 years ago. Even policy driven by whimsy and nostalgia isn’t new. In John Gray’s piece on the Tories, this was the most interesting paragraph:

“It is usually a mistake to suppose that politicians are much influenced by the thinkers they are fond of quoting: though Thatcher cited The Road to Serfdom more than once it is unclear whether she had read anything of Hayek. Yet she fully shared Hayek’s view that free markets reinforce ‘traditional values’, which is an inversion of their actual effect. The conservative country of which she dreamed had more in common with Britain in the 1950s, an artefact of Labour collectivism, than it did with the one that emerged from her free-market policies. A highly mobile labour market enforces a regime of continuous change. The type of personality that thrives in these conditions is the opposite of the stolid, dutiful bourgeois Thatcher envisioned. Skill in re-inventing yourself is the key virtue, along with a readiness to cut your losses as soon as any commitment becomes unprofitable or unexciting. Thatcher’s economic revolution was meant to go along with something like a social restoration. Instead, it led to Britain as it is today, a society obsessed with the idea of personal self-realisation, more liberal in sexual matters, less monocultural and less class-bound, more insecure and more unequal.”

God alone knows what we’ll be saying about The Big Society in 30 years, should Cameron beat the odds and creep into power. I say why risk it?

I’ll confess that the change in mood has made me a little excited about this poll. Two weeks ago I was ready to put a gun in my mouth but the last few days have made life a little more interesting. Although there’s nothing approaching a radical rethink of British society on the cards, no real ideas to speak of, there is a gradual feeling that this is a watershed election. The result may change the way people vote forever and permanently marginalise the right in the event of a proportional system being imposed. What’s less clear, at least to me, is whether such a change would lead to good governance. The democratic question is a little trickier. We’ve been governed by a minority for decades so a coalition of minorities seems fairer, if those interests are broadly aligned, but if the Tories are forever pushed into opposition – whether you love them or hate them, is that fair to the 30-40% of the electorate that support them? Nothing’s ever easy is it? As you ponder these big questions I’m going to go and eat some noodles.

Notes on the General Election

Abraham Lincoln once said “I am now the most miserable man living”. Well thanks to the choice put before us  ahead of the May 6th election, I’d like to stake my claim as Abe’s successor.

Should you enter this general election campaign with a sense of drift, conflicted as to how you should vote (the optimistic presumption being that you intend to do so) then I recommend something to you; I think you should turn off your Television, cancel any newspaper and magazine subscriptions and steer clear of any media, except this blog of course, until May 7^th. The Political class will have nothing new to tell you between now and then, nothing of substance anyway and frankly if you’ve not been paying attention to the debate prior to now you should consider whether it’s prudent for you to vote at all. Someone with so little interest in the political process or the position of each party is under qualified to choose the next government. For God’s sake leave it to the people who’ve kept up with dispatches.

Seriously, sod off.

The forthcoming courting of the electorate is a spectacle it’s best to avoid. The media, which has emaciated itself using shorthand, superciliousness and a paucity of analysis, will pretend to interrogate the main parties while simultaneously regurgitating their fatuous drivel. During this part of the election cycle we’re introduced to each party’s narrative and the broadcasters, who treat each story like their book group’s choice of the week, discuss style and how successful each set of authors has been at communicating their message. This might be the future of the country but it’s little more than a curio for these commentators – gossip in the village hall. It would be rare, with a concentration on supermarket visits and Ed Balls speech to a hall full hall of pig-ignorant school children, for someone to break off and say “Well we must leave Ed Balls there, as we’re now going to chair a rigorous 3 hour debate on the last 13 years of Labour Education policy and invite you to contrast the analysis of these independent experts with the modest and indistinct promises of the education secretary.”

The first day of campaigning underlined the problem. Brown stood outside No.10 with his entire cast of grotesques bringing up the rear. The message was that a vote for Labour was a vote for the entire cabinet including The Prince of Darkness, Ed’s Balls and David Millibland; the experienced team. Holy shit, was that Yvette Cooper? In daylight? This was a high risk launch. Brown talked about anything but policy – his background, his values, as though we should give a shit what these may be. “How are you going to get us out of this mess Prime Minister?” The question that no one in the press pack bothered to ask. Instead we learnt the PM was an ordinary man. Just what the doctor ordered in extraordinary circumstances.

In contrast David Cameron stood alone outside London County Hall for his opening address. As the Tories had abolished the GLC in 1986 and made the building redundant (it now houses a f’king aquarium and a movie museum), it showed the leadership had a sense of humour, if not of history. The real reason he was there of course was to give photographers and broadcasters alike the opportunity to record him with the Palace of Westminster in the background – looking suitably prime ministerial. If only it were that simple, eh Dave?

Then there was Nick Cleggover, who may yet win the Election of 2028 as he’s been busy seeding a liberal generation over the last 18 months. He was there with Vince Cable – the Liberal you know, and consequently we were invited to contrast Clegg’s youth and dynamism with Cable’s experience – the dream ticket. Youth and Experience was also a song by Cliff Richard for younger readers.

So day one and you can see how all three party leaders were already using the media, the broadcasters being their willing accomplices, to retard the understanding and simplify the issues. They’ll be 29 more days of this. TURN OFF THAT FUCKING TELEVISION.

Oh and please don’t expect the Prime Ministerial debates to help you choose because if there was any danger of them revealing anything about the actual intentions of each party, you can bet your life they wouldn’t be happening.

If you made it to 4am on Election Night 2005 you were rewarded with this:

It’s worth taking stock of what we know about each of the main parties today, because it’s the past five and in the government’s case, thirteen years which matter, not the next four weeks when you’ll be told that black is white, up is down and would you mind forgetting about the last parliament as this is ostensibly a debate about the future?

Labour

Does Labour deserve to be re-elected, that’s an important question – almost as important as whether the Conservatives have earned the right to replace them, but we’ll come to that.

We don’t need to waste too much time talking about Labour’s three thumping majorities and the unprecedented power that’s given them in the commons; it’s only relevant to note how little they’ve done with it.

Tony Benn, the great Labour parliamentarian, delivered a devastating critique of Thatcherism when he stood up in the commons in 1990, following her resignation and the subsequent vote of no confidence in the Conservative “administration.”

“I don’t believe in scapegoats” he said referring to Thatcher’s iconic status as the personification of Conservatism in the 80’s, “Every member of the cabinet, every minister who’s trouped through the lobby night after night after night in support of these polices and every member of the public who’s supported them at the ballot box shares equal responsibility.”

The argument, that the party and the public who supported them should bare the shame for the state of the nation, is no less pertinent today when applied to New Labour. That isn’t the interpretation Brown would have liked you to draw this morning as he stood there with what’s left of Labour’s talent but that’s the informed view of history.

This is a government that was re-elected in 2001 despite introducing a market into higher education, emasculating the civil service and compromising its independence, reneging on its commitment to constitutional reform, weakening the Union in hoc to a narrow separatist interest within the PLP, and ceding powers to Europe without a democratic mandate to do so. Parliament was sidelined, so that legislation introduced, not least that which referred to criminal justice, was some of the least scrutinised new laws ever committed to the statute book.

Labour was re-elected in 2005 having become, in its approach to the judiciary, the most right wing government in 50 years. It ended the automatic right to jury trial, enshrined since the Magna Carta, it supported the flouting of the United Nations Charter, committed the country to an illegal war and again failed to introduce any significant constitutional reform.

Now in 2010 Labour is once again whoring for a mandate. What will they do with it? Well since 2005 the evidence suggests they will react to events rather than attempt to shape them – a sure fire indicator that there’s no strength of purpose driving policy. Labour’s ideological vacuum, a former socially democratic party trying to fit the square of it’s old doctrine through the circle of Neo-Thatcherite market based capitalism, has bankrupted the country and destroyed any realistic chance of changing the political outlook of the nation. This was before a penny was spent on the re-capitalisation of the banks incidentally, the private finance initiative had scuppered our future prosperity long before that.

There’s little point in being committed to investment in public services if you’re not prepared to raise direct taxes to pay for it. Tricking the public in doing it by stealth and hiding the extent of the public’s liability with off balance accounting tells you that the government thinks you’re imbeciles and worse, they’re happy to patronise you, telling you can have something for nothing.

Labour have told us that they don’t want to raise the taxes you do notice because that punishes aspiration (a nod to the atomistic culture we now take for granted) but actually, the government is terrified of middle England voters. Why do these voters have such a disproportionate hold over the political agenda? The reluctance to reform the electoral system will have had a lot to do with it. Because they haven’t done this as a government is it clear, to borrow that corrupted phrase, that they have no interest in change and every interest in maintaining the status quo with a few adjustments – by definition, that’s conservatism. The government believes that all marginal voters are Tories you see and so they must govern that way in order to retain power. It doesn’t even matter that because of this trap they can’t do anything they’d want to do with that power, else they’d lose, it’s just been enough to have it these past 13 years.

The 2005-10 parliament has been illuminating. That may have been due to leaks rather transparency but we’ll take what we can get. Any political commentator or indeed member of the public could have picked up a book or turned on the internet and learnt about the Additional Costs Allowance if they’d been the slightest bit interested. The ACA was hardly a secret. The reason this hasn’t been an issue at previous elections, nor reform of the Lords, nor Parliament’s sovereign power over the European Parliament, nor attempts to curb and perhaps abolish the Royal prerogative, nor the state’s role in industry, nor radical reform to the tax system, nor how you increase spending within your means rather than doing it on the never never, is because these issues, which have real currency when it comes to effecting the way government is run and so how effectively it can introduce change, is buried in favour of what we’ll call tinkering arguments.

This is a discourse about managerial approaches within the existing system – who’s going to put a penny on income tax, should VAT go up to 18%, should a benefit be cut by 1% or not at all? – all of which sounds very important and is, on a micro-economic level, but is also a guarantor that radical reform will be kept in its box. Consequently wasteful or self-defeating trends in governance are perpetuated, reinforced and ultimate recycled. You can blame the government but when people are canvassed on Television in marginal seats – politically illiterate people mind, and tell you that their concerns are child care provision or VAT or tax cuts, you can understand why there’s no political will to patch up the gash in the Titanic’s hull, merely to rearrange the  deck chairs. Lack of electoral reform is a self-inflicted wound for the political parties.

The government stands before us again and asks for another term in which it promises to do everything it said it would do in 1997 – a change to the voting system which might pull off the trick of appearing to be fairer while simultaneously stripping some of you of your right to elect a direct representative. Does the alternative vote producer a better result? Possibly, but for whom? Not for the electorate, who won’t have any greater power to hold MPs to account, only the superficial satisfaction of knowing that MP numbers may be slightly better weighted in line with the national mood. It’s a cosmetic change and doesn’t get anywhere close to reforming what Brown calls “the contract” between the state and its citizens. There’s more on the Alternative vote here if you’re interested.

If Brown were serious about ATV why did he block the recommendations of the Jenkins report back in 1998? Why has no one in Westminster asked the question of how you develop a system that maintains the link between the vote and the directly elected constituency member while simultaneously abolishing safe seats? If we’ve little hope of getting rid of an MP because of the deferential/tribal voters within a constituency who’d vote for the local Labour or Conservative politician regardless of how they voted in the commons, which polices they supported or whether they’ve stuck to their campaign promises, then why have an election at all? Millions of us have been pissing in the wind for decades. At this point I’d also make a plea to deferential voters in safe seats. Please don’t vote simply because you want to cock block the opposition. If you no longer support your party’s position or are underwhelmed by their record, stay at home. It may make a difference in some seats. Don’t skewer our election result with your token votes. If you’re not interested then we’re not interested in your party political loyalty. We certainly don’t want to live with the result for five fucking years.

Ask a Labour MP what the government has achieved in the past 13 years and its less a tome’s worth of achievements, rather a two page pamphlet. They might talk about the minimum wage or devolution – first term actions and only one of which is uncontentious in its claim to be an achievement. They might talk about redistribution of wealth through the tax system but how serious is a government about helping the poor when it introduces a lower tax band for “modest earners”, i.e. poor people, only to abolish it for a quick headline on the basic rate being cut to 20p ahead of an aborted general election? In fact any Labour MP who wasn’t totally cynical would have to concede that the government had achieved very little over three terms. He or she might argue this is a result of bureaucracy, events dear boy, events or lethargy at the top of government in opposition to an aggressive media but the truth is that the Labour Party of the Nineties and Noughties operated in service to Tony Blair’s vanity and Gordon Brown’s ego. Astonishingly these proved ineffective as a driver for change. What was missing was an ideologue – an ideology, a progressive agenda, any sort of strategy for introducing one or the political will to push it through. The Labour party itself, impotent for so much of this period, was content to go along with it provided it kept winning. Why vote for a party that only stands for its own re-election? That’s a tough one isn’t it?

The Conservatives

It used to be said that you could only be sure with the Conservatives. If only that were still true. 1997 was a truly horrifying election for what used to be the natural, i.e. deferentially selected, party of government. Most of the moderate base within the party was wiped out that night and that’s an affliction that has blighted them right up to the present day. Cameron’s adoption of the triangulation strategy following three defeats in which the party articulated its beliefs and was duly murdered, succeeded in softening the parties rhetoric and making them less repulsive to the centre left voter but it was also an empty bit of strategising. This is because the public is acutely aware, and by public I mean those which aren’t natural Tory supporters, that the advocacy of big tent politics is a principle free, catch all movement which produces large amounts of nothing. We know this because it was New Labour’s programme of government for the first 10 years. We have our metric.

So we know that Cameron would like a more representative party – more Blacks, Asians, Women, Cats and Homosexuals. Great news but what about the policies? The Tories could be the most liberal facing organisation on Earth but without a programme for government they’re a protest vote.

Cameron’s four and half years as leader has given the party a period of stability and a more friendly face but it’s also been a great period of timidity. Once thing we do know, despite their best efforts to hide it, is that The Conservatives have polices on just about everything. How? Because they commissioned 18 month long policy groups on social justice, public services, quality of life and national and international security. It’s been their bad luck that the main issue during this parliamentary term has been the economy and their policy group reported prior to the collapse which made all their growth based projections redundant. They may know exactly what they plan to do on the economy but the combination of a weak Shadow Chancellor, the wretched George Osborne and the realisation that the Economy is wrecked and so any decision taken is bound to rival colon cancer for vote winning potential, has caused them to retreat into a netherworld of vague pledges and half-hearted attacks on government spending plans.

So what about those other polices? Why not share them with the nation if they’re fully defined? I don’t know about you but the only reason I’d hide my polices from the electorate is if I thought they ran contrary to the perceived liberal bias in the media whose job it would be to present them to the voters. Sure, I can argue “we’re Conservatives, what do you expect?” but Dave’s strategy has focused on getting us to forget the Conservatives are Conservatives. Every time we remember we’ve voted for someone else.

So should you vote Conservative? Even they don’t know.

The Liberals

The default position for those that loathe the listlessness of Labour and the feckless Tories is to support a hung parliament in which The Liberals could have a controlling interest. As a natural liberal supporter, in as much as my instinct has always been in line with the social liberal tradition which the party has represented since the 1980s, I’m seduced by this idea but conflicted on several points.

First and foremost I’m opposed to a coalition for reasons I’ve already alluded to, but primarily because it’s anti-democratic in the sense that no one voted for it on election day. It’s the one aspect of this result that makes me highly uncomfortable.

The public can’t know what a fusion of the Liberal and Conservative or Liberal and Labour manifesto would mean for the economy or housing or health or education, and consequently it’s not a programme which anyone, including Liberal voters, will have endorsed so where’s the mandate? Secondly, proportionality, the price of coalition, leads to it becoming a permanent fixture, which results in weak government and a rolling programme of broad tent politics within the political class. It’s an institutional straitjacket which formalises the kind of centralisation of ideas we’ve seen over the last 13 years. So the Liberals gain some seats? So. Fucking. What? What’s been lost is the ability for a Liberal party to be radical – the reason you vote for them in the first place. Only a majority Liberal government can be truly radical and that won’t happen unless there’s a huge shift in their support.

We might watch with some amusement as Liberal activists talk about the similarities between the two main parties. It’s a perfectly valid criticism of course but reasonably intelligent voters will have already worked out that the Liberals will not get to govern alone and so will be forced to join with once of these clones if they’re serious about government. That begs the legitimate question of which side they favour, which policies they’d be prepared to ditch in a coalition government and where they’d be prepared to compromise. It’s a different game for the Liberal politician and the Liberal voter alike, so the pretence that a party with 20% national support may win outright under first past he post is intellectually and politically dishonest. Liberal voters are entitled to know, prior to Election day, where Clegg’s potential affiliation lies and how the coalition would function. Don’t think about turning on that TV in the hope of finding out though, that’s a decision for a time when public involvement has safely passed. The problem for the Lib Dem supporter who may be certain that the party is on the right side of the key arguments is knowing what they’re actually voting for. That’s the elephant in the election studio this time around. It may also stick in the gut of some of you that the Liberals could drop seats and end up in the Treasury or the Home Office. Personally speaking, if there’s one ministry I’d want a Liberal Democrat in, it’s Transport. What hope?

This may sound as though I don’t want Liberal support to be recognised within government but this isn’t the case. 20% of the electorate have their votes ignored at each election and that has to be addressed. The acknowledgement must also extend to the media whose open contempt for Liberalism is astonishing. If you doubt that the media and political class are closely aligned then you only need watch the BBC’s politics coverage when an election isn’t on and there’s no legal obligation to give the three parties equal billing, to see that 6 million votes doesn’t buy you a lot of screen time.

It could well be that only a period of coalition, plagued though it is by questions of legitimacy, may be the solution to the Liberal question. A sort of interim parliament which forces both Labour and Conservative to reassess how they might re-gain popular support to form a majority administration might be good for the country – not to mention the politically disenfranchised. A real period in government would give Liberal Democrats a substantial foundation upon which to fight the 2014/15 Election, assuming they succeeded in implementing a progressive agenda. It would even be possible for Nick Clegg (or his successor) to explain away any dilution of the manifesto as the cost of coalition. As there’s never been a Liberal government within the lifetime of a single voter, the notion of a Liberal government remains abstract. Here’s the opportunity, within the existing parliamentary system, to show what Liberals would do with power. The problems will be many, however. Could they resist the temptation to re-align with Labour, were they successful as a centre left government? Would the machinery of power and being accountable to the entire electorate, rather than your own support base, stultify their ambitions as it did with New Labour?

Whatever happens, changes will be afoot. They’ll be 144 new MPs in the new parliament, regardless of the vote, because of those that couldn’t bare a life under full public scrutiny. Bless their hearts, they didn’t actually expect to be accountable between elections. No party will enjoy the power and political advantage that Labour squandered over the past 13 years. In short, there will be a huge intake who will be facing circumstances which will be a world away from the 1997 intake’s land of rainbows and moonbeams.

So what do you do on May 6th? For what it’s worth I recommend you vote with your conscience and your intellect. If you have neither I suggest you vote Conservative.

Doctor Who-ha!

Now they’re gone, is it okay to say it? It is? Spank Rassilon, because the blood collecting in the socket of my eye of harmony was compromising my ability to think straight; Davis and Tennant were not good for Doctor Who and I’m glad they’re dead.

Davis has been celebrated by some, we’ll call them bastards, as the saviour of the programme but I suggest that public hunger for the show’s return and the lasting popularity of the brand was a foundation upon which only the most inept lead writer could flounder. To Russell’s credit however, he gave it his all.

Young and undemanding children may have enjoyed the “RTD” era of maddening hyperactivity, ear bleeding orchestral support and pop cultural masturbation but for fans in double digits it was a progressively dehumanising spectacle – like watching your friend slowly wither and die within a bad relationship. Episodes were instantly dated via the inclusion of Britney Spears songs and references to Big Brother, camp triumphed over wit and The Doctor himself failed to grow, becoming a slightly silly know it all whose lapses into more challenging emotional states didn’t ring true because he spent most of his time engaged in camp buffoonery.

Those of us that were broken in toward the end of the original run will remember the promise of the so called “Cartmel masterplan” – the creation of a mysterious and complexed backstory for the Doctor, sanctioned by then producer Andrew Cartmel, which would gradually be woven into Sylvester McCoy’s serials to deepen the Doctor’s character and widen the ambition of the stories. The axe scuppered Cartmel’s strategy but the final two seasons of the original series – 25 and 26 for Who-ha-lets, gave a taste and showed the potential. When the series returned it was clear that the mental age of the target audience had been slashed by ten years.

Where the F are you going? Look behind you, you lanky shuntsack!

Season 31 began with the hope that new head writer Steven Moffat would restore depth and breadth to the show, which was in danger of having nothing to say and even contriving to do that fairly badly. If you’ve stuck with Who these past 5 years, you’ll know that Moffat is responsible for the best of the new run. The Empty Child and Blink were the highlights of Eccleston’s and Tennant’s respective tenures. It must have been awful for him, deputising to Davis, when their sensibilities and understanding of the show were so diametrically opposed. To be in the Doctor Who writer’s room during this period would be to know the plight of German generals in the Fuhrer bunker during the final days of the war.

Of course Doctor Who has had so many eras that there is no universally agreed template for the tone and character of the series – it’s a blank canvas for each new creative team but there’s also enough of it for new writers to study and discern what has and hasn’t worked. Fans, as ever, take whatever they’re given with good grace – what choice have they got?  However, the point had been reached where the head as the well as the heart needed to be engaged. What hope then, that The Eleventh Hour, as it surely is as we approach a tipping point in viewer loyalty, could mint a fresh approach for the series? Some as it happens.

Matt Smith’s debut was emboldened by the elements that make Moffat an excellent Doctor Who writer. His ability to synch with the sensibilities of the audience, both young and old, is his great strength. Amelia Pond, the Doctor’s new companion, whom we meet as a child, has an everyday problem with a fantastic explanation – a crack in her bedroom wall that happens to be a gash in the universe – yes, a gash, separating the girl’s bedroom from an alien parasite. It’s a enjoyable conceit; you can imagine young children going to bed afterwards, looking at a crack in the plaster and pressing their ear to the wall just in case.

The reworking of the everyday into the uncanny is what good Doctor Who is all about. The other treat for our tadpoles is the realisation that The Doctor, following his first meeting with the young Amelia, has been recast by adults as her imaginary friend. For younger viewers he is probably just that, so it’s wish fulfilment with its balls out.

The Eleventh Hour worked because the relationship between the new Doctor with his proto-hominid appearance, and Amy – blissfully free of stone age characteristics, works perfectly and gives the story some weight. The reinvention of Doctor Who, or rather its liberation from high concept hokum to something more rooted in character is Moffat’s mission statement for the season and he makes quick work of it, tying a taper around your balls with the words “fairytale” on it and pulling at regular intervals.

The Doctor is the magical figure that appears at the bottom of young Amelia’s garden, she has a name suited for a fairy story according to the Gallifreyian ganglinoid, and poor Amy, because of her forced childhood relocation from Scotland to England, has always felt like an outsider and is therefore ideologically primed for escape with an off kilter loon-a-tune from a superior culture. She also has the requisite imagination required for the position, having spent most of her life inventing adventures for herself and the man that four psychiatrists have convinced her to be a fantasy. I know what you’re thinking – what else might she fantasise about? God, I wish I knew.

Crucially for the adult audience, there’s wit and sex in abundance. Fems will wonder, not without some foundation, if Karen Gillan would have been cast were she not the single most attractive human being to have ever walked the face of the Earth and the answer is probably not. Her feistiness and dollops of wide-eyed kook spark off Smith’s eccentric undergraduate quite nicely, but someone with so much power to engorge tissue should really be on after the watershed. Millions of young teens had their first sexual experience on Saturday night and those that think that the licence fee is excessive should consider that £140 wouldn’t buy you anyone of comparable quality on the street who’d stay a whole hour. The BBC remains extraordinary value. Indeed, the feminist cause will not be advanced by Gillan’s turn as a family friendly sex object – a kiss-a-gram that turns up at parties and puckers up for lecherous villagers. Nevertheless as a means of locking in older men, prisoners and deviants across the country it’s a foolproof strategy and everyone at BBC Wales should be congratulated…and investigated.

Are you making eyes at me Karen? Yes, of course you are.

Smith’s casting is also a little cynical in that regard – he’s 27, lest the horror of seeing anyone in middle age cause millions of viewers to violently throw up over themselves, and probably attractive to ladies that have a genetic memory of being smashed over the skull with a club and taken to a cave for sandpaper-rough intercourse. Those that aren’t drawn to his appearance, or are repelled by it as my friend Hayley is (“He’s ugly as fuck”), may yet be won over by the new Doctor’s easy manner. He could charm the arse off a Delthusian Spore Beast, whatever the hell that is.

Moffat shows that he’s got an eye for a visual gag or two. I enjoyed poor Jeff’s laptop being snatched before he had a chance to close his pornography and the moment the Doctor’s text message to Amy, which read “duck”, was received, seconds before the ladder from the fire engine the Doctor has commandeered came crashing through a nearby window. Corny perhaps but I sniggered like a pervert.

Doctor Vision – a moment when the we get a snapshot tour of the village green as Smith tries to retrieve a grab from his memory, was also a nice innovation and symptomatic of the greater imagination on display throughout the episode. This is in stark contrast to its overcooked and underwritten predecessors. Davis’ approach to the same scene might have had the Doctor and Amy doing the locomotion throughout the village – Kylie blaring across the green from the village hall tannoy and the explanation for what was imagined to be a funny and crowd pleasing moment, delivered via a hokum bolt-on – “The alien is sensitive to certain sound frequencies which, by some extraordinary coincidence, the song has in spades. We’ve just created musical catnip!” Indeed, musical catnip would be the antidote to Murray Gold’s score, which through restrained at points, was still an irritant – the equivalent of someone inserting a trumpet into you while you try to concentrate on your partner’s conversation.

This opening adventure wasn’t a myth-making extravaganza – it was an introduction and a character based one at that. The tone was energetic, playful and often magical, and these are qualities which are unlikely to do the show any long-term harm. Eventually we will crave meat of course but for now it was enough to ogle the starter. Smith’s Doctor was occasionally afflicted with Tennantus – the odd mannerism bleeding into his performance but this is a moment when, if you’re a Whovian, it’s time to put on that hat that makes you so unattractive to the popular and socially dynamic part of the population and justify this less as imitation and more as a post-regenerative cognitive overlap which will be ironed out as the new man emerges, or something.

There’s evidence that the blackened stuff in the Doctor’s soul might emerge as the season progresses, with the introduction of the now de rigueur arc for the year – suitably abstract talk of “silence falling” and opening panasomethingorother. It’s also there in the new title sequence, which although, in the only real disappointment of the episode, doesn’t feature Smith’s face as was rumoured (Dear BBC, we don’t give a fuck who Matt Smith is, let’s us see the Doctor’s face and credit the actors at the end!), does have a new malevolent vortex which in contrast to the previous tunnel of wonders, seems to be an angry maelstrom, lashing out at the TARDIS with bolts of lightning and eventually developing into a passage of fire which closely resembled the approach to Satan’s colon. Ron Grainer’s theme has also had a sinister makeover, suggesting that the days of whimsy and Ghostbusters being sung in the console room are firmly behind us.

Those with long memories will know that the Doctor’s future is a dark one – he is now, assuming that anyone at Who HQ still pays attention to these things, just half a lifetime shy of the Valeyard – the evil amalgamation of Smith and his successor that once threatened to uncurl Colin Baker’s hair. Is a bit of inner-conflict about to show up in time travel town? I fucking hope so, I’ve booked the next 12 Saturday nights off and I’d rather take my chances with that trumpet that endure Harry Hill on the other side.

Doctor Who was reviewed using set of eyes no.2. The living room chair was “Horace”. The wine was Marks and Spencer’s Fleurie – Domaine Grille-Midi 2007.