The Labour Party appears to have hired a very enthusiastic undergraduate as a chief political strategist. What else can explain the incompetent and embarrassing attempts to shame the Coalition Government. Where are the serious-minded statesmen ready to form the next government?
In my view, the shark-jump moment was when Labour recruited a bereaved family who, for the last two years, had constructed a shrine to their dead child as a poster family against the ludicrously termed “bedroom tax”. Any sane and genuinely compassionate person would instinctively know that this couple needed support to get over their bereavement, not their desire to maintain a shrine co-opted for a campaign. Surely mature arguments can be made without resorting to this sort of thing?
Instead the entire campaign seemed to follow this pattern.
There are plenty of perfectly good arguments against penalising people for having unoccupied rooms without calling it, inappropriately, a “tax”. These arguments could make specific reference to cases of unfairness, the problems of affordable alternative accommodation not being available, unforeseen administrative expenses and a range of issues not requiring immature hysterics. Surely this is possible?
Apparently not. As we have now descended even further into sub-reality TV stupidity. Perhaps it is because so-called “social media” is now seen as being on the front line of political campaigns, so we need political campaigns which are the equivalent of photos of kittens to make voters go “ooooh” with cyber-sympathy, and clips of harpooned whales to make them go “aaaargh!” with virtual-rage.
The latest in this line of cretinism and idiocy is the the supposed outrage of George Osborne “parking” in a disabled spot. It is difficult to summon the energy to discuss this seriously, so I’ll leave most of it to Iain Dale, who makes the point very well.
But let’s note the following:
- It was not George Osborne’s car, it was a police car
- It was not George Osborne driving, it was a police officer
- The car was not actually parked, merely stopping briefly to pick up Osborne.
- There was a whole row of unoccupied disabled spaces, as you can see in the other photo published by the mirror, but conveniently cropped out of the the “soundbite” image intended to be Facebooked, Blogged and Tweeted.
But none of this is the point. Regardless of your political affiliation, and regardless of what you think of George Osborne’s policies, he is The Chancellor of the Exchequer, that is to say, after the Queen and the Prime Minister, one of the United Kingdom’s most senior public figures. American politics has its share of buffoonery, but I can’t imagine the US press getting excited because a Secret Service chauffeur stopped briefly in a disabled parking bay to pick up Hillary Clinton. In fact, I can’t imagine another country where police vehicle stopping for a few second in a disabled bay – especially when others were available – to pick up a very senior government official would be cause for commentary, let alone press coverage.
Has British politics really sunk to this level of immaturity.
The Michael Philpot episode is another example, One team, led by the idiotic Daily Mail, claiming he’s a result of the welfare state, the other side led by a Labour MP tweeting that he was a Tory voter. All that needs to be said is that Philpot was a psychopathic killer who was brought to justice. This is all that well-balanced, sane people will think and say, and this is why party-political obsessives are so out of touch with ‘normal people’.
Now, you may think that all of this is of little consequence. perhaps you think that unseating George Osborne is so important the means don’t matter. Perhaps you even think, like John Wight of Sociality Unity, that untruthful and hysterical social media campaigns are fine and that telling lies is a valid strategy if the end-game is ‘good’. But here’s the thing: if this is how we treat politicians, we’ll get the sort of politicians who don’t mind being pelted with this sort manufactured abuse. That is to say, sociopaths.
Is that what we want?
