I am an undecided voter. I’m telling you this for two reasons: first, because I want all my local candidates to read this and come to my house to prostrate themselves in front of me while I cackle and hurl chicken bones at them like a bored medieval king. Second, because I’m worried that I might end up being swayed by a campaign poster.
Imagine that. Imagine if that was the thing that solidified your decision. Imagine coming out of the polling station next month and being accosted by a reporter. “Why did you vote the way you did?” they’d ask. “Oh, I saw a poster of a wrecking ball, and the wrecking ball had the word ‘Labour’ written on it, and I thought that was quite clever,” you’d reply, before punching yourself in the face over and over again in front of everyone until someone put a blanket around you and walked you home.
Election campaign posters are the worst. At least with party political broadcasts there’s room for nuance, even if that nuance involves sub-Malick footage of a girl twirling around in a field (Conservative) or a man with a face like a smashed egg yelling 50-year-old comedy catchphrases at a dispassionate viewership (Ukip). A poster, though, relies on nothing but blunt force trauma. Tired, deathless, aggressively witless blunt force trauma.
With one exception, all the major parties have now unveiled their campaign posters. Predictably, they’re all hopeless. Labour pinched the queuing imagery from the Conservatives’ 1979 poster to make a point about NHS waiting times, which opens the door for other parties to do the same. The SNP could use it with the slogan “This way to an independent Scotland”. Ukip could use it to bark about immigration. Any party could use it with the slogan “Queue here to see that weird thing growing on George Osborne’s bum. Urr, I bet it’s full of spider eggs”. And, in all honesty, that’s probably who I’d end up voting for.
But the other parties are just as bad. The Conservatives legitimately went for the wrecking-ball idea, because they mixed up the pile marked “poster ideas” with the one marked “deliberately horrible rubbish thought up during a boozy lunch”. The Liberal Democrats used the slogan “Look left, look right, then cross”, because you’d make more of a difference by blindly stumbling into traffic than you would by voting Lib Dem in 2015. The Ukip poster superimposed escalators on to the white cliffs of Dover, because one of its main policies would appear to be better infrastructure for failed suicide attempts.
And then there’s the Green party. They haven’t unveiled their poster yet, not because posters are an outdated and unhelpful use of the planet’s finite resources, but because they genuinely can’t find anyone to put it up for them. Which is sort of endearing, really, or at least as endearing as something that legitimately terrifying can be.
Thankfully, though, we might be nearing the end of the age of the poster. It has been rumoured that parties have spent half as much on outdoor posters this year as they did in 2010. Soon, we may never have to see another boneheaded political poster again. Just millions and millions of boneheaded political tweets. Which, come to think of it, is much worse. In summary, we’re all effed.
