I want to ask a question that is not as stupid as it first sounds: what is an election about? Making a choice, obviously. But the process of making that choice should be something more. It ought also to be a conversation about the challenges facing the country and an education in how the rival leaders would meet them. In this vital respect, this shrill yet sterile contest has been a terrible letdown and no less so for the disappointment being rather predictable.
I have been watching campaigns for too long to be naive about them. There is always more heat than light, an excess of noise and a paucity of signal. Few elections at anytime anywhere have been characterised by wholemeal honesty from the contestants. Candour is in even shorter supply when the race is as tight as this one and the complexion of the next government so hard to predict. One veteran Tory who has held some of the biggest offices of state puts it well when he says that one of the arts of electioneering is to get through the campaign “without making more than three silly promises that you are going to regret if you become the government”. By my reckoning, the silly promise count is now way in excess of three.
It is not surprising that there seem to be an unprecedentedly large number of swithering voters this close to the moment of national decision. Where voters have expressed a yearning for more honesty, they have been met with evasion and obfuscation. Where we needed engagement between the political class and a disillusioned electorate, the campaigns have devoted their greatest efforts to protecting their leaders from the public. Where we needed a searching debate about our country, the voters are being asked to go to the polling stations wearing blindfolds.
Huge issues that will confront the next government, whatever form it takes, have been missing from the campaign. Britain’s role in the world has barely been discussed and in so much as it has been debated it has been narrowed to an argument about whether you need four submarines or just the three to maintain a credible nuclear deterrent. The environment has hardly got a word in edgeways. The economy has been talked about a lot, but usually in superficialities. I hear everyone assert that we need a high-skills, high-wage, high-productivity economy; I hear precious little about where all these wonderful jobs are going to come from. How is Britain going to earn a successful living in the future? That most fundamental of questions remains unanswered. We are in a fog of uncertainty about what sort of country we will be living in. We cannot even be sure that this country will exist in five years’ time. Labour is locked in a desperate struggle for survival north of the Tweed against the rampant Scottish nationalists and has not the breath to spare to describe how it would remake the United Kingdom. The so-called Conservative and Unionist party has responded by colluding with the nationalists in stoking the grievances that are pulling the UK apart.
Europe is another dog that has not really barked. Labour, knowing its anti-referendum position is not popular, hasn’t wanted to major on the issue. The Tories, knowing it divides them and hoping to concentrate on the economy, have had no desire to go there either. Yet this we know. If a Tory-led government emerges from this election, the first half of the next parliament will be utterly consumed by Europe as David Cameron first tries to pursue a renegotiation of the terms of EU membership and then puts whatever he comes up with to a referendum that will set his party against itself and could propel us out of the European Union. We near the end of this campaign none the wiser as to what he would actually seek to renegotiate.
The parties have made some foolishly exact commitments not to raise taxes, pledges that will come back to bite someone if economic circumstances force them to break those promises. At the same time, they have sprayed around a lot of spending pledges without being able to say how they will be paid for. We started the campaign in the dark about where a Conservative government would make the £12bn of further welfare cuts that they are committed to. We end the campaign with the Tories still refusing to say. We do not know from which money tree they are going to find the cash to pay for their promised tax cuts. Nor how they would finance their commitment to extra funding for the NHS.
The Tories have been the worst offender when it comes to making unfunded promises, but they are not the only ones asking an untrusting electorate to take their pledges on trust. Labour says it will reduce the deficit year on year, but the savings it has so far identified fall far short of what that implies. “Hell, yes, I’m tough enough,” Ed Miliband assures us. If he becomes prime minister, he’d better be because it certainly is going to be hell conducting tough spending rounds whether he has a parliamentary majority or not. The Lib Dems are opaque about exactly where they would find all the money required to meet the targets they have committed to. The Scottish nationalists have posed, and greatly profited from that pose, as the anti-austerity party. Yet when the Institute for Fiscal Studies runs the numbers, it finds a great gulf between the SNP’s rhetoric and the reality of how it rules in Edinburgh.
I tip my hat to the IFS for its rigorous examination of the rival parties’ arithmetic, but we have also bumped up against the limitations of relying on invigilators, however expert and independent. They can bemoan the lack of candour from politicians, but they can’t make up for it. They can show us where the parties have left blanks, but they can’t force them to fill them. Journalists, as a collective, have not had great success either. Some interviewers have made valiant efforts to try to extract honest answers from the politicians, but the enterprise has been frustrated. The daily morning news conference, which was once a feature of British election campaigns, has been scrapped by the parties. Why expose yourself to a bunch of troublesome hacks asking too many tricksy questions when you can do a soft photo-op and gob up plasticated soundbites for the news bulletins? David Cameron has spent campaign time with eight-year-olds who will not be voting until long after he has departed Number 10 whatever happens on Thursday. In an effort to make his public appearances look more “prime ministerial”, Ed Miliband travels everywhere with a lectern. In one of the more surreal images of the campaign, the Labour leader even addressed a field from behind his portable shield.
There has been a notable reduction in the number of opportunities for voters – who can ask much ruder questions than professional interviewers – to pin down the politicians. Throughout my career watching elections, the campaigns have got progressively more and more averse to exposing the leaders to the unpredictable. At this election, the chances of a candidate for Number 10 having an encounter with a random voter has been reduced to near zero. We know why. They all live in terror of a “Mrs Duffy moment”, the collision with a Rochdale pensioner at the last election, which was so catastrophic for Gordon Brown, or a “Sharron Storer moment”, when the Birmingham postmistress ambushed Tony Blair with her complaints about the NHS.
Just about everyone has said that the winner of last Thursday’s Question Time special was the audience. They did indeed put some sharp questions to the leaders. But this has been so much remarked upon only because it was so exceptional to see a few raw exchanges between politicians and the public.
My complaints about the way they have run this campaign will be treated by party managers as a form of congratulation. Job – from their point of view – well done. They have got through it without being forced to say what they don’t want to say, talk to anyone they don’t want to meet or address any issue that they prefer to avoid. Yet, in seeking safety, they take a risk. An electorate that already thinks its politicians are remote can see how reluctant they are to engage with the public, even when they are after their votes. An electorate already deeply cynical about politicians bearing gifts is made more so by their refusal to say how the goodies that they promise will be paid for. An electorate that senses that some fundamental things are at stake intuits that they are not being seriously discussed.
The true meaning of an election is often only apparent some time later. In five years’ time, it is conceivable that we will look back on this contest as the fork in the road that led on to the unravelling of two unions. The United Kingdom will have been broken and the non-Scottish part of it will have exited the European Union. I don’t predict that will be the outcome, but it is certainly to be counted in the range of possibilities. If that turns out to be the case, we will look back on this campaign and wonder why we spent so much time talking about Ed Miliband’s former girlfriends and looking at David Cameron fingerpainting with schoolchildren.
