Suffering from election fatigue?

I think I probably am, but not in the ways you might immediately think.

In this era of media- and spin-led politics, we are seemingly interminably subjected to a constant barrage of soundbites, ‘news’, glad-handing, palm-pressing, baby-kissing and any other inconsequential drivel that our political classes and their sycophants in the media care to inflict upon us.

It all feels so incredibly… meaningless.

On the assumption that most of you will have watched the party leader debates over recent weeks, I will very briefly give you my thoughts on them so far.

Nick Clegg – reasonably charismatic speaker, but smacks of Tony Blair in 1997. Will tell you just about anything he thinks you want to hear without actually telling what he’s going to do. But since he’s different and rails against sleaze and expenses, he must be better, right? No. Aside from the scrapping of Trident (wrong) and yet still replacing it with some as yet unknown deterrent, and the amnesty to immigrants and their extended families (also wrong), it would seem that just about every point he makes is to undermine the other two parties’ integrity and to subliminally press home the point that proportional representation is the only fair way to run a country. I absolutely disagree with this, but that’s another matter. Norman Tebbit’s blog on how PR could give the BNP 60 seats at the next election is worth a read.

Incidentally, those in favour of a hung parliament would do very well to read this article on how disastrously Italy’s government has run in the last 60 years, since they introduced PR as a response to Mussolini’s fascism. Despite of course, that Hitler came to power as a result of PR. Ah well…

David Cameron – seemed almost visibly shell-shocked in the first debate, being browbeaten from both sides of his podium by the other two, but came back reasonably well in the second. He is trying to be all things to all men, yet nothing to individuals. Needs to get off the fence and be more specific. Unfortunately in this era of opinion poll- and think-tank-policy-making, he has been told that he is less popular when making attacks on the records of either of the other two parties.

Since Labour’s record is the political equivalent of an open goal twelve miles wide, and one that needs shooting in to repeatedly, I think that this is an enormous shame, and we still don’t really know anything about the Tories except that they somehow plan to fix a broken Britain. But what do I know? I’m just a voting member of the public.

Gordon Brown – pretty typical really. Just stands there trotting out the latest Soviet-style tractor production statistics about how Labour have done such an astonishing job for the last 13 years, that none of this is their fault, and how he, despite being the root cause of almost everything that is wrong with Britain and British politics today, is just the right man to lead us out of the mess he and his buddy Blair have created. I’m not a violent man, but every time he opens his mouth, I have an overwhelming desire to smash his face in. How anyone in their right mind (who isn’t on the dole or employed by the state – which in fairness is now about 20% of the electorate) could vote for him, I simply have no idea.

As has just been spread all over the news, Gordon Brown was extremely nice to a 66-year-old widow when speaking to her in person, and then had the temerity to call her a ‘bigot’ when out of earshot. Shame it was caught on microphone, but it’s nice to know what he really thinks of anyone who dares question the open-door-immigration policy.

However, and this really is the main thrust of this article – the reason I’m really struggling with the whole electoral process is that it feels so incredibly hollow and pointless.

As has been superbly put by both Christopher Booker (also covering expenses and the utterly appalling Climate Change Act) and Norman Tebbit (above) before me, there are a couple of absolutely key points that all three main parties are completely and utterly failing to address.

The first is public deficit, debt and expenditure. This year Gordon Brown is planning on spending an enormous £704 billion, mostly on our unreformed and inefficient public sector and the welfare state. This figure is double that of 1997. Given that inflation has (according to official statistics) almost universally been below 3%, have services doubled in quality? Rhetorical question, of course.

Of this £704bn, £541bn is coming from revenue and £163bn is being borrowed. Just think about that for one minute. We, as a country, are borrowing 30% more than we earn in just one year, and at a rate of £446,000,000 EVERY SINGLE DAY. Anyone who saw the Prime Mentalist repeatedly laying in to Cameron about not raising the rate of National Insurance by 1% and “taking six thousand million out of the economy” will fully understand why I’d love to shove my fist down his throat. Aside from how it is even vaguely possible that NOT raising a tax will TAKE money from the economy, the figures they are talking about are absolutely trivial when taken against the bigger picture. Already the Institute for Fiscal Studies has taken all three parties to account for running an ‘Ostrich Election‘, and commentators country-wide are warning that we are a serious contender for becoming the next Greece. I can’t stress enough how serious this is. This excellent 2-minute video from America (who are in less trouble than we are, per capita) will give some idea of how bad things are.

There is no plan for us not to borrow it in coming years, or even to start cutting spending in any meaningful manner. The main parties are squabbling about half a billion here, and three billion there. Who cares? If it takes them a week to decide where to find £3 billion to cut, the debt WILL ALREADY HAVE RISEN BY MORE THAN THEY ARE CUTTING IT. By 2014, paying the interest on our £1,400,000,000,000 debt alone (not touching the debt itself) will be £60 per week, per family, for the entire United Kingdom. That’s as much as the poorest spend on food, and it’s paying for Brown’s profligacy.

These figures need repeating up and down the country, in every pub and sitting room in the land. We are bankrupt, and we are going to suffer because of it. This is Gordon Brown and Labour’s fault. Never, ever forget that.

These figures are simply staggering, and yet we are subjected to these postulating popinjays prancing around prattling on about insignificant nothings, while ignoring the fact that the biggest elephant in the room in history is standing right in front of them. Why, you might ask? Well the main reason is that none of them has the faintest idea of what to do about it. Brown knows that he cannot dismantle his client state, or the few remaining voters his awful party has will leave. Cameron has been told by his pollsters and quango buddies that revealing the economic realities will only lose him votes, because the electorate would rather have their heads in the sand, and Clegg is more interested in making sure his party get more seats through PR than actually telling us what he plans to do when he gets them.

The second elephant being blithely ignored by these three is Europe:

I’ll tell you the main reason that the only things that have been discussed so far in the debates are complete trivialities, and that is that we have almost completely lost the power to decide what to do for ourselves in just about every other area of government. Our decision-making powers on farming, ecology, fishing, immigration, employment, business law, food and hygiene, financial services, the City of London and many, many more have all been moved to Europe. Schools, hospitals and crime are just about all they have left to bicker over, and that is why the recent debates have been so blinkered and meaningless.

Just to make clear – the MEPs in Europe are from almost universally pro-European parties (though thankfully this has recently become marginally less so), and are all extremely interested in maintaining what is now the status quo and progressing their own national interests in this pan-European ‘democracy’. We only need to look at how democratically the ‘No’ votes in France, Holland and Ireland were treated by our European overlords to see how seriously they view their democratic responsibilities.

These pro-European-superstate politicians and their countries profit enormously by taking money and policy control away from Britain. As we are one of only two net contributors to the world’s largest gravy train, every country except Germany falls in to this category. Of course Germany is practically running the show, so they’re quite happy to pay for the privilege. We, on the other hand, are losing vast tracts of our sovereignty as well as colossal sums of cash, in order to be allowed to be part of this ridiculous club. Aside from the MEPs, those many hundreds of thousands of people who work for the EU, with their massively inflated salaries, and index-linked, gold-plated, final-salary pensions (paid for by whom, you may ask), are universally unelected, unaccountable, and unsackable. In most cases, we don’t even know who they are. And yet to all intents and purposes, they are running our country for us. Anyone else see anything wrong there?

Of course all three of our main parties are broadly europhile, especially the Lib Dems and Labour. Nick Clegg, after all, is an ex-eurocrat turned MEP, turned MP. And still being an ardent Europhile, he clearly didn’t come away thinking any less of an organisation that has never had its accounts signed off by auditors at year end. Incidentally the numbers and corruption in that link are astonishing. Here is a particular gem: “As part of the EU’s £6.3 million ‘Year of Intercultural Dialogue’, the commission ran a project called ‘Donkeypedia’, in which a donkey travelled through the Netherlands and children met the donkey. The idea, we are told, was ‘creating a reflection of all European identities. What are the similarities, what are the differences? Donkeypedia will try to make this feeling tangible by interacting and in dialogue with its surroundings while walking a European route through several countries and collecting data to support this image.” What on earth are these people on?

Some may say that a more closely-integrated Europe is the only way to tackle the economic powerhouses of America and China. Personally I think that is only very partially true, and has been hijacked in the name of European federalism. The original charter to which we signed up was a universal free trade agreement, one which would allow free movement of goods and employment throughout the EU, and one can hardly argue against such a thing. What we are faced with now is a very different beast indeed. There are a number of extremely well-off countries in Europe who are still in the EFTA but not the EU. Norway and Switzerland, for example. Their quality of life is better than ours, they live longer than us, their income per capita is higher than ours, their schools are better than ours, their health system is better than ours. Their trade within Europe has not been affected in the slightest by not having the European Constitution/Treaty of Lisbon forced upon them by lying politicians. So why shouldn’t we be exactly the same?

My opinion (as I simply can’t see any other reason) on why certain politicians are so keen is that the Euro MP expenses, pensions and salaries are even more ludicrously inflated and even less regulated than our own. Since our own MPs are almost all totally unemployable in anything other than ineffective government, they’ve all got their eyes on a nice little sinecure over in Brussels or Strasbourg, not unlike those most Socialist of couples, the Kinnocks, both of who have made a frankly astonishing fortune since leaving the previous incarnation of ‘the party of the people’. Or indeed our own Mr. Clegg, who claimed up to £2.5 million in ten years while based in Europe. Sadly because of the extremely dodgy rules on MEPs allowances, we are unlikely to ever know just how much he got.

That our lords and masters in the three main parties are so willing to sell out the sovereignty of their own homeland to such an organisation is utterly despicable to me, but sadly that is the political environment in which we have the great misfortune to live.