Stepping Back Onto the Long Road

Despite the budget gaining much favour with the grey vote and the recent disposal of Howard Flight, Labour’s lead was yesterday cut to three points. We have to ask the question...do these events affect what people think about the parties?

Hmm...of course the answer is yes, to some degree, so we have to be more precise here. How long term is the average voter’s memory? References to the war, a subject of overwhelming emotional response that at the time threatened to sink the government, seem now to be vague and concerned only with the fear of George Bush’s next move. So would Labour’s slim lead be any fatter if they had previously reigned in their chest-beating US bum-suckery?

But the political beast is a lot less compartmentalised than that. These events, these weapons that beat our leaders and are used by our leaders to beat the other side, are not some extraneous organ we can pluck out of the body and examine whilst the body carries on as normal. We cannot consider the heart without considering the blood it pumps through the brain.

Right. I have no idea what the hell that meant and I am pretty sure you don’t either. Let’s try and gather this into a ball... Okay. Here’s a fact. If Labour did not take us to war in the past, a basic understanding of alternate histories tells us that this would not translate into an instant n-point change here in the present. The wonderful world of what-ifs does not work like that because events are not discrete entities. They are interconnected in a swamp of infinite cause and effect. You cannot remove a meatball from underneath the spaghetti without disturbing the mozzarella.

Whoops...come back! I seem to need scraping off the bottom of some rotten science fiction barrel here...

Anyway, this is why many of us cannot help but follow every last swing of the Swingometer, despite being stricken with the apathy resulting from New Labour stripping us of any sense of us being able to control our environment, leaving us beaten and broken before the ballot box. The average election is a gambler’s wet dream and a nightmare rolled into one. I saw the odds yesterday, chalked onto some blackboard in a Guardian photograph. With Labour seen as a shoo-in, the Tories were riding on a generous 7-1. Hell, surely the Money is tempted to sniff around those odds, especially at this early stage.

Because the result is not going to be as obvious as has been anticipated for the last year. Since Labour are going to spend the election throwing around low-level fears based on the latter years of the last Tory government, this means a smart Tory front bench simply needs a couple of Fear-based H-bombs to set the agenda. An apocalyse of terror...rubbing together the right sticks to create a bad spark to light the fire that sends a mushroom cloud up to the heavens. It could be done, and the sky would be a little darker...put simply, if this scenario came to pass, Labour would not have lost the election, the Tories would have won it.

Meanwhile, our good friend Robert Kilroy-Silk appeared in a one-hour documentary in which he deigned to spend a week living within the gypsy society. He came across as we anticipated and the programme will not have changed anyone’s mind about the man.

Now, the rules for broadcasting political material states that a certain balance must be maintained when an election is called...Rory Bremner slipped under the wire last week to remind us of this fact , saying that from next week he couldn’t describe New Labour as a bunch of nasty, cynical and greedy sons of bitches...without applying the same labels to the other side.

So with Kilroy having spectacularly failed to prove himself as a Good Man whilst visiting a gypsy site, we must now have balance. True, Kilroy is an irrelevance. Furthermore, we have been here before, with politicians trying to play the media in a variety of silly Let’s Pretend scenarios (Michael Portillo living for a week as single mother, for example), but what have they done for us lately?

The answer is obvious. Blair must be filmed on an anti-war march. He must get his hands dirty repainting old For Sale signs, assembling at Hyde Park Corner and chanting slogans such as “Bollocks To Me”. It would be piece of television that would keep Channel Four Top 50 list shows in business for years. In the following excerpt Tony Blair meets a student, inevitably called Rupert.

Blair: And why are you here?

Rupert: Yeah, I’m here because I want to tell Blair that we are sick of him and his warmongering!

Blair: Go on then, I’m Tony Blair, and in a very real sense I’m listening.

Rupert: Ha ha! Yes, very good. But seriously mate, what a shoddy mask. What did you do, drop it in a vat of acid?

Blair: Mask?

Rupert looks closely at the guy and then performs a classic double take...leaping cartoon-like into the air, his back arching and his eyes extending to a yard in length in Blair’s direction whilst he screams like the girlie sidekick in a B-Movie. Then he picks up a shovel.

Elsewhere, Charles Kennedy could hold his nose and infiltrate the Daily Mail, while Micheel Howard could pop round for tea chez Van Helsing. And bored camera crews would follow them around and producers would lick their lips and viewers would scratch their balls and switch over to Footballers’ Wives. Trouble is, no matter how satisfying it would be for the Dear Leader to be seen toadying up to the peasants, we only watch these things when it stars some twisted jabbering idiot at whom we can laugh and point.

Newsnight was busy last night doing some laughing and pointing of their own. In an exciting new election strand about voter apathy, they spend three minutes sneering at some Nottingham Trent students who live in a house together. Laugh! At the first year student who makes his own clothes. Cry! As the students react to the ponderous line of questioning with clueless sub-Oxbridge opinions. Snigger! As some young people in the north talk in comical non-London accents...

Well, balls to Newsnight. This pisspoor “light-hearted” strand is obnoxious and condescending and consists mainly of intrusive shots of saucepans that Haven’t Been Washed for Days. This is not insight. This is pointless and smug and stinks up this normally respectable programme.

Why should I care? I have no idea, of course, but when good journalism starts to ditch insight for bad stereotyping you have to wonder what the hell is going on. Easy target, them students.

Ah well. There is lots of bad journalism to come, lots of simplistic graphics to dazzle us and lots of politicians trying to twist the reporting to their own benefit. Labour politicians will feature in tedious “What’s On Your iPod?” articles and will fail to give the only dignified answer “who fucking cares?”

But there will be plenty of good journalism too. Interesting analysis, entertaining commentary about desperate vote-grabbing, searing condemnations and thoughtful and useful interviews. And to this I say – to borrow a toe-curling Americanism – bring it on.