The Utter Boredom that is the 2019 Election

One of my correspondents has expressed concern that I have not produced a briefing or an essay on the current election. There have been two reasons for this - one commercial and one political. The third I won't go into too much is that I have been utterly bored by it but that is personal.

Let us get the commercial one out of the way first. I have a loyal following, it seems, but I have been wondering for some time who, amongst those who matter to me in business terms, spends any time on LinkedIn and whether, if they do, they even see what I write. Let me be frank. I look at LinkedIn cursorily once a day (most but not all days), generally to check if someone has sent me a Message which happens every now and then. I 'like' a few postings from the same very small set of people and then I move on. I suspect most people do much the same. LinkedIn is, for me, just a partial substitute for a brochure. I carefully maintain the accuracy of my Profile (because I know a lot of people check up on me) but I have no illusions about the platform's marketing value.

In fact, significant revenue has emerged in the recent past from one or two people who found it easy to contact me on the platform but I knew them quite well anyway. They did not come to me because of my postings. Near-weekly postings are (on reflection) an intellectual self-indulgence, based in any case on discussion in private Facebook Groups where yet another group of often expert contacts are far more engaged than here on LinkedIn. My most loyal followers also partly overlap between platforms - they were only getting a more refined and thoughtful version here of what was being said on that other much more lively and versatile platform. We could contest and discuss on Facebook whereas comments here were useful but desultory.

So was all that scribbling worth it? The answer became 'no'. My notes are more likely to be monthly (if that) and not weekly from now on and I am not going to expect or even look for any response. I may even give up on them altogether in the Spring and communicate only with clients and contacts directly and on Facebook. What I write can just lie on the record as part of the 'brochure'. We are in any case going through a complete re-evaluation of what we do for the simple reason that things are going exceptionally well. It is while things are going well that one should rethink one's situation, not in a panic, plummetting down into some unexpected future abyss.

The political reason is going to seem rather self-evident to most readers - the current election has proved one of the least interesting and dullest on record. This is a paradox because the final outcome is one of the most critical in post-war British history and we have just gone through some three years or more of intense excitement in which almost every day brought something new with its highs and its lows. You could say that this election exposes the brutal reality of our personal power to change anything. It is the threat of an election in the future that makes politicians responsive to our shifts in mood but when an election is called, most of us have pretty well decided where we stand and most of us live in places where our paltry little vote probably affects nothing.

The efforts of politicians at election time are targeted quite precisely at a few hundreds of thousands of voters in only a third of seats at most, probably much less. Hence all those ridiculous and expensive and probably unimplementable promises that are the despair of the thinking voter but which might, just might, persuade one of our less thoughtful voters to take one side or the other in the hope that some personal problem might be solved by a politician who probably does not give a stuff whether it is solved or not but will promise what it takes to get that cross next to their name.

The rest of us stand by and watch what amounts to a media circus in which the political class embarrasses itself with appeals to the prejudices and desires of 'floating voters' in certain localities while trying to ensure that its own activists are motivated to knock on doors and get supporters out. It is at that point when our political system is supposed to be most democratic that it is also most ridiculous and possibly least democratic - after all, my once in several years vote in a 'yellow dog' Tory seat is not going to make a blind bit of difference to who governs me whereas my activities as a Brexit campaigner over four years have undoubtedly played some role in setting the terms for that struggle in the 'marginals'.

This is why most of us are not excited by it all. Yes, the media are getting very very excited but then these are the half wits whose job it is to get excited about nothing in particular and to construct increasingly hysterical narratives in the process. What Prince Andrew may or may not have got up to in a bedroom a few years ago is vastly more important to these people than whether we can raise the funds for the infrastructure we need or whether our administrative capacity is sufficient to implement all those daft promises being poured out like sewage.

There is nothing more embarrassing now than the average journalist (Andrew Neil very much excepted) who insists on intruding themselve between we the people and any politician. If there is one group in society who are bringing themselves into disrepute in this election, it is the mainstream media. For it, the election is not about the careful analysis of the different parties' values and policies or a measured view of the balance of power within parties who may make up a Government. No, it is about treating the election as if it was presidential in complete defiance of our constitutional realities, trying to 'catch people out', asking the same unenlightening question over and over again like the drunk at the bar in the 'Dog and Duck' or asserting their own dubious divine right to dictate the conditions for our vote.

The partisan nature of the media, especially public broacasters, has also come to the fore. This does not mean they are for one party rather than the other but rather that they are partisan for their own prejudices and interests which are always those of an amorphous 'centre', one which very few citizens, right or left, actually want any more. The low point was the silliness of the ice sculpture on Channel 4 because the debate was on environmental matters and the Tory Party had offered their 'expert' Michael Gove. Gove being questioned would have been far more informative on Conservative Party policy than having a Prime Minister whose job can be precisely defined by his not having to be expert on anything but, no, Channel 4 insisted that we were voting presidentially for party leaders and party leaders have to be masters of every aspect of policy - no doubt including all the information that we pay civil servants to manage for us.

There are other absurdities. It is clear that there are two fundamental debates going on in the country- between Remain and Leave and between capitalism and socialism. Within that clash we find socialist Leavers and capitalist Remainers facing difficult choices. Socialist Leavers have no voice in this election. In practice, in any debate or 'fairness situation', you will tend to have three centre-left Remain parties (Labour, the Liberal Democrats and the SNP) competing with each other to attack just one party - the Conservatives. In effect, half the population has three media votes to one for the other half. But it gets worse ...

This is a vote for the destiny of the United Kingdom. The regional or petty nationalist parties must have their say but they are not standing in England and the bulk of the population in a united kingdom is south of the Scottish border. Yet matters are arranged so that those who do not live in their territories have to suffer their parochial issues being imposed on them and (if they are conservative or Brexit) adding a Remain centre-left voice (in the case of the SNP which gets inordinate time) to the two existing centre-left Remain voices (the Liberal Democrats and Labour).

A low point was the BBC Question Time debate where an audience was clearly biased for the centre-left by the equal positions given to the four parties so that a small number of Scots drove the Scottish Independence question as if the SNP represented a quarter of the British population rather than roughly half the Scottish population. Frankly, the majority knew the SNP's position and rants from the floor in favour of Scottish Independence added nothing to the national debate but the real point is that the voices of Labour and Conservatism Unionism were diminished and the voice of Scottish Nationalism handed a megaphone to shout at people who did not have an SNP candidate in Broxtowe or Cheltenham they could vote for. This was ridiculous but so typical of the BBC.

The bias of the media system remains obvious - it does not like conservatism, it does not like Johnson and it does not like Brexit and so every opportunity is used to bend the rules wherever possible if not to show partisan support (this is beyond those rules and that line is never crossed). then to set the agenda in the direction that suits the centre-left. Thus it is that BBC News and Radio 4 have intensified their social coverage to give an impression of a nation suffering under austerity and to build up the multiculturalist social cohesion model that serves the centre-left. The questioning too may be fair in its demand that Leaders justify their sometimes dodgy positioning and claims (on all sides) but it never allows any contextualisation of positions. Journalists shout down any attempt to explain the complexities of an issue and sit there stubbornly demanding yes/no answers to questions that do not have yes/no answers. Either journalists are generally not very bright or they are totally lost in narratives which owe more to the folk tale than to anything remotely rational or useful. One expects at any time a journalist to ask Boris when did he stop beating his wife.

As to the election itself, while the media grandstand and the politicians play their games targeted at mobilising activists and winning the marginals, the dullness of it all owes a great deal to the poor campaigning skills of the staggeringly uncharismatic Jo Swinson (Liberal Democrat) and the almost neurotically defensive posture of the Prime Minister which may well lose him this election. A Hung Parliament is a loss to the Tories and that has to be said straight away. The country desperately needs the smack of firm Government with a strong Parliamentary majority - whether Socialist or Capitalist may not matter so very much - and yet the lacklustre campaigning of Number Ten threatens to whittle away a natural lead, siphon votes back to the Brexit Party and allow Tory Remainers to think they can risk all on a Liberal Democrat win in their particular seat.

The only decent campaigner (outside Scotland) is Jeremy Corbyn whose generally steady nerve and ability to get across a set of economic policies that are genuinely popular with many people after years of Tory ineptitude and austerity was moving the polls away from Johnson (at least until the stabilisation of the last few days). Johnson seemed unable to get out of his seat and take the calculated risks he was once known for. This may have its reasons but it is also dull, dull, dull.

If the Tories fail to get a majority (which is unlikely but possible), you can place the blame squarely on Johnson's caution and Hammond's economics - Hammond left Johnson with a legacy that he had to deal with far more decisively than he has done to date. Hammond and May were a dead weight on the country and it is not easy for Johnson to reinvent the Tory brand to remove a nine year patina of ineptitude in a matter of months. And, of course, what Johnson's team did not calculate for was the sheer awfulness of Liberal Democrat campaigning - we have received no less than six bits of paper in a known Brexit household of four votes and our local Twitter feed is full of irritation at the tactic. Johnson expected perhaps to 'walk it' on the basis that the Remain vote would 'split'. It is clear that many Remain potential Lib Dem voters are giving up on Swinson and preferring an EU-contained socialism to the Hard Remain Party.

As to the result, no prediction is entirely sensible. On current trend, the Tories are in danger of losing their majority though I suspect that risk is now diminishing unless the Tories do something very stupid. Past Conservative behaviour does suggest they are quite capable of doing something idiotic and lack of energy in the last seven days might just be that idiotic thing we all fear or hope for depending on our stance. If so, we would rapidly drift into a hung Parliament or a small Tory minority that could prove troublesome in the last days of Brexit or during subsequent trade negotiations.

My best bet is now a weakish Tory Government under constant campaigning pressure from the centre-left but, in these last days, things could yet change - another hung parliament leads us into territory that could result in an equally weak Marxist government that has to engineer yet another election for its own majority or the Brexit working class vote could come out in force in the marginals and deliver something close to a landslide for Boris. If the latter happens, then his defensive and cautious tactics would have been fully justified. The fact that prominent advisers like Cummings have clearly been getting nervous suggests that someone somewhere in Conservative Central Office needs to pull their finger out and deal with Corbyn before he deals with them. Even a full-on Marxist Government with a big majority would be better than another year of a Parliament unable to make any decisions and distracting us with constitutional innovation and unwanted celtic referenda.