CommonSpace columnist James McEnaney is not having a happy General Election…
IN THE Herald last week, political commentator David Torrance described the ongoing election as “vacuous”, “awful” and “depressing”.
My only objection to his characterisation of the campaign is that I cannot for the life of me understand what makes him so bloody cheerful. From top to bottom and at almost every point in between this is the sort of campaign that has made technocratic dictatorship look increasingly appealing and left me seriously considering a one-way ticket to Tenerife (or Mars).
Of course, voters in Scotland, who will soon have voted six times in three years, have really had to endure (and I choose that word very deliberately) two campaigns.
This is the sort of campaign that has made technocratic dictatorship look increasingly appealing and left me seriously considering a one-way ticket to Tenerife (or Mars).
At UK level, the Tories have spent weeks (though it feels like months) attempting to run a presidential, personality-focused campaign around a third-or-fourth-rate candidate with all the charisma and intellect of an over-cooked cabbage.
The Maybot (patent pending, probably) is not yet licensed to operate in the vicinity of the general public, presumably because her programmers aren’t quite sure that her software is either ‘strong and stable’ or fully compliant with the three laws of robotics.
Instead of actually answering questions, Maybot’s speaker – cleverly disguised as a human mouth – simply plays a series of pre-recorded, Lynton Crosby-approved lines on an interminable loop until everyone is so bored by it all that they forget what the question was and go home.
Nonetheless, we’re expected to believe that a woman who is too much of a coward to debate her opponents or do a Radio 4 interview (Radio 4, for God’s sake!) is up to the job of negotiating with the EU.
It’s actually difficult to believe just how bad the Conservative campaign has been. I mean, how hard must you have to work to make a human being, even Theresa May, look so thoroughly ill-equipped for just about any job one could imagine? Surely it’d be less effort to at least appear competent?
At UK level, the Tories have spent weeks (though it feels like months) attempting to run a presidential, personality-focused campaign around a candidate with all the charisma and intellect of an over-cooked cabbage.
But there’s a crack in everything – even this all-encompassing, Dante-esque nightmare – and through it has come the light of a Labour party doing much better than anyone imaged.
Jeremy Corbyn’s party is, by any measure, resurgent – it has delivered an impressive (and popular) manifesto, got supporters out on the streets and cut the polling gap, at least according to some companies, to single figures.
In Corbynism (an awful and reductive phrase, but you get what I mean) the Labour Party has also found a message that people like me – pro-independence socialists who can just about bring themselves to support the SNP under very specific circumstances – are desperate to hear.
Like former Rise candidate and prominent independence campaigner Cat Boyd, I’d be dancing to the polling station, my wee red heart all aflutter, if this were a presidential election or if I lived in an English constituency.
The odds on a hung parliament now stand at a thoroughly tempting 5/1 and it looks as though we have at least avoided the doomsday scenario of a three-figure Conservative majority. Some people have even started to believe that Corbyn could win the election and, with support from the Liberal Democrats, SNP and others, form the next government.
But there’s a crack in everything – even this all-encompassing, Dante-esque nightmare – and through it has come the light of a Labour party doing much better than anyone imaged.
It must be wonderful to believe that we’ll crawl through this river of shit and come out clean on the other side – but I’m not buying it. Hope, like the man said, is a dangerous thing, and there is no beautiful Mexican beach in our immediate future.
The cold, hard, pungent reality is that, for all Labour’s progress, we are still staring down the barrel of an almost hilariously incompetent Tory government in possession of a blank-cheque manifesto and a Brexit battle-plan that would make a kamikaze pilot think twice.
If the Tories end this election with a majority of less than 50 it will, rightly, feel like a failure (the Tory penchant for regicide may even resurface) but the rest of us will still be doomed.
The Scottish campaign hasn’t been any better. North of the border, Labour, the Lib Dems and the Tories have relentlessly pushed an anti-independence, anti-SNP message that hinges on begging voters to ignore their policies and focus on “sending the Nats a message”.
The Tories are likely to be the big winners from this, but it’s all relative – they’ll take a few seats, no doubt, but they’ll manage it only by confirming beyond all doubt that they offer little more than an anti-SNP protest vote (see Murdo Fraser protesting the SNP manifesto launch for further details).
The SNP has probably run the least bad campaign but that’s about it, and it all feels a very long way from its triumphant ascension just a few years ago.
The Lib Dems are feeling confident (aren’t they always?) and have a good chance of taking a couple of constituencies, most notably East Dunbartonshire and Edinburgh West, but their campaign has been just as dire as the rest.
And then there’s Scottish Labour, which may also pick up a constituency or two despite running a campaign that has, at points, plumbed new depths of mind-numbing dullness. Kezia Dugdale’s party (or branch, depending on your preference) finds itself in the difficult position of enjoying a boost in the polls that is almost certainly down to the Corbyn effect, despite the majority of the party in Scotland rejecting the man himself and its sole existing MP, Ian Murray, accusing him of destroying the Labour party. At least the aftermath should be interesting.
Having decided to stand in just three constituencies, the Scottish Greens aren’t really involved in any of the electoral calculus, so that just leaves the SNP. Not even its most – erm – committed supporters seriously expect the party to hold on to all of the 56 seats it won in 2015 but, on the other side of that coin, nobody is really in any doubt that it will win yet another clear majority of Scottish seats.
This was always going to be a difficult election for the SNP but, whether it admits it or not, the party has not run a good campaign: there have been mis-steps around the issue the a second referendum, for example, and too much of its pitch has clung to the “stronger for Scotland” shtick.
There has also been the uncomfortable realisation – brutally highlighted by a very personal attack from Kezia Dugdale during an STV leaders debate – that Nicola Sturgeon’s teflon coating has disappeared.
So tomorrow at 10pm I’ll be breathing a huge sigh of relief, safe in the knowledge that I can go back to being miserable about the usual things.
The SNP has probably run the least bad campaign but that’s about it, and it all feels a very long way from its triumphant ascension just a few years ago.
So tomorrow at 10pm I’ll be breathing a huge sigh of relief, safe in the knowledge that I can go back to being miserable about the usual things: Scottish weather, people who can’t drive yet are allowed on the roads, and the injustice of Firefly being cancelled after just one season.
And I’ll be praying that we can make it at least a year without having to go through all of this again.
Picture courtesy of Henti Smith
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