With the election not yet even officially called and still five weeks away, this is already the most sterile, empty and intellectually insulting campaign in memory. It also looks like turning into the nastiest, with dirty tricks, bugging, smears, and both parties vying in demagoguery, writes Geoffrey Wheatcroft in today’s Guardian.
Well yes. But some of the journalism hasn’t been much better has it? Take for example this from, erm, Geoffrey Wheatcroft in today’s Guardian:
Over the years of Blair’s leadership, he and his cabal have themselves regularly echoed the rhetoric of fascism, from “New Labour” (as in Neue Ordnung) to “the third way”, a phrase much used by fascists in the interwar years. At one time, the Blairites liked to tell us that we lived in a Young Country. Quite apart from the fact that this is simply wrong in terms of history or demography, it recalled Giovinezza, or Youth, the marching song of Mussolini’s Blackshirts. We were endlessly told about the People’s Government, People’s Wimbledon, and even the People’s Princess. It is terrifying that anyone should have been quite so tone deaf to memories of a Third Reich with its People’s Courts and People’s Car (Volkswagen).
That should raise the level of debate.
