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Politics

Hang On – UK election unfolds

It’s the last day before voting day and the three main parties in the UK have unleashed their last attempts to lure voters to their fold. Or should it be to scare voters away from their opponents’ fold? The Fear Factor, redolent of the Top Trumps Horror Series, has become a major player in this election that could have seismic consequences on the British electoral system.

Here, for example, is the Daily Mail’s toon – moved to the front page today for extra punch. MAC (the cartoonist) depicts the obvious choice for anyone toying between the (LibDem friendly) hung parliament and what the Tories would see as an alternative: strong government.

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Mac on the Mail

In it’s front page article the Mail is ruthless on those “wrong-headed” individuals toying with the idea of a hung-parliament. And the usual suspect arguments are out – shot at the crowd with wanton abandonment.

The Mail cannot stress too strongly how wrong-headed and dangerous it believes this view is. Whoever wins the election, Britain will desperately need bold, decisive government if we’re to avoid the nightmare into which Greece has been plunged. A hung parliament, with the probability of a coalition or pact, will result in a weak administration, dependent on back-room deals and shabby compromises.

Now now. A bold, decisive government like Mr Brown’s (and Blair’s before it did preside over the initial tsunami of banking and financial chaos but this is not the time to remind the giddy electors is it?

Labour has used the Blair trump to “shake some sense” into the “hung parliament voter”.  In what sounds like a more sensible approach Blair admonished Labour voters who thought of voting tactically (LibDem) to keep the Tories out. The Guardian reports Blair shooting down the LibDems :

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Tony Blair: Fear Factor '97

The Telegraph pulled out all sorts of rabbits out of its hat. The YouGov poll showing LibDems down to 24% and a surge for Labour to 30% provides the background to a number of anti-hung parliament possibilities. There’s the possible deal with Northern Ireland’s Unionists (better the coalition partner you can chew), or (sit down before you read this) Simon Cowell‘s backing Cameron as “the prime minister Britain needs at this time”. They did say that the TV debates had an X Factor feel about them but hey… Simon Cowell??

If the backing of multi-millionaire Cowell would not dissuade Tory voters from voting LibDem then you had the good old guilt by affinity – remember the “zokk u fergha“? “Clegg styles himself as successor to Blair” – it doesn’t get any scarier for a down and out Tory does it?

For an interesting take on the world outside “tribal pulls” read the Times’ resident genius Finkelstein. Unlike most Brits he never felt the tribal pull so he does not find it difficult to opt for Cameron this time round:

So, annoyingly, this election will be determined by people fighting a tribal urge that I’ve never felt and can’t completely relate to. The best I can offer is this: once I considered myself on the centre Left, and I don’t any more. And once I, too, had “never voted Tory”, but in the end I didn’t find it very difficult at all.

Then there’s Rachel Sylvester (Off with their heads! Soon the cuts will begin) who has identified a bit of the “trash and destroy” in the UK campaign too:

They would like us to think that their inspiration is Barack Obama’s The Audacity of Hope. But in fact, as the country prepares to go to the polls, the political parties seem to have been more influenced by Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail.

Gordon Brown yesterday described the Tory manifesto as a “horror show”. Labour’s recent election broadcast featured a tax inspector with a clipboard going, like the Grim Reaper, from house to house telling families which tax credits and cancer treatments they will lose if David Cameron wins on May 6. It was scare mongering of the worst kind.

The Conservatives, meanwhile, are trying to terrify the electorate about the prospect of a hung Parliament with posters featuring a noose. To me the subliminal message was “Vote Tory, get hung”, an eccentric strategy for a party trying to shed a “nasty” image caused in part by rightwingers’ support for capital punishment. Their other most memorable image was a pair of bovver boots.

Nick Clegg is picking up support because he looks like a different kind of politician, one who does not engage in the petty squabbling and negative campaigning of the “two old parties”. But my local Liberal Democrat candidate has just delivered a leaflet that has only one message, printed in huge capital letters across it: “I don’t trust politicians either.” From a man who is himself trying to become an MP, it looks less like a new politics than the same old dirty tricks.

I just love Sylvester’s conclusion. The dilemma is very much alive in the UK as it will be in Malta come next election:

Like Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, this campaign has got curiouser and curiouser. With Nick Clegg going from Churchill to a Nazi in less than a week, Gordon Brown meeting an Elvis impersonator and David Cameron pulling the head off a chicken, there has been something surreal to the whole thing — and not just in spin alley. The election itself will be a bit like the Queen of Hearts’ declaration: “Sentence first — verdict afterwards!” But will the voters also soon shout: “Off with their heads”?

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Hang or Behead - Fear Factor Unknown

addendum:

Back in 2008 when the attacks on the “Wasted Voters” were akin to the carpet bombing of Dresden on a bad day I had written an open letter on J’accuse (Daphne’s Invigilators) in answer to their attacks. That it is still very relevant two years on says much about how far we are advancing locally.

Guardian Special: General Election 2010 press coverage the day before

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Zolabytes

Staring at the Sun

He no longer blogs as often as he used to but he’s “come out of hiding for a sort of sober not-totally-humorous post” about DCG. In his Zolabyte contribution Vlad of Fool’s Cap fame rolls up his sleeves for a dig in the dirt – his very own analysis of the DCG blogging phenomenon.

Staring at the Sun
or How I Began to Start Worrying about Daphne Caruana Galizia
by Vlad

The sun is great and all, but looking directly at it will make you go blind. One cannot help but think the same about Daphne Caruana Galizia.

When that volcano erupted earlier this year, Caruana Galizia graduated from the ranks of the outspoken to an unbridled temper with a laptop and a keen determination to wreak vengeance.

For those that are not her unquestioning adherents _ of whom she has many _ the spectacle has cast a car crash spell. But whatever voyeuristic appeal there once was has now begun to wear thin.

Reading Caruana Galizia’s blog, Running Commentary, once felt like trawling those YouTube clips of BMX bikers smashing into walls, but now it just leaves the unpleasant aftertaste that comes with watching al-Qaeda beheading videos.

But how exactly did Caruana Galizia evolve from an engaging and persuasive, if frequently disagreeable, poison pen letter writer into an unremitting practitioner of the self-righteous apoplectic fit? And why should any right-thinking Maltese person care?

The transformation was in part accidental; precipitated by media reports about her husband’s domestic abuse report to the police and the alleged whispering plot hatched by Magistrate Consuelo Scerri Herrera and her friends. Her indignation and the torrents of abuse that followed, she explained between jigs of cholera-induced St. Vitas’ dance, was an adequate response to the brazen intrusion on her private family affairs.

Well, fine, it was an absurdly hypocritical position to adopt for someone that has made a cottage industry out of spreading salacious tittle-tattle and dubious insinuations, but what to do? She was scorned, and vanquishing her foes and salting their fields must have seemed like the only fair retort.

What seemed like a fleeting moment of pique, however, has now calcified into a permanent register of bilious ire. Caruana Galizia quickly took advantage of the popularity of her rage-shtick. Despite her affected air of insouciant contempt, she craves approval and infamy, or what passes for it on the Internet at any rate.

Running Commentary has accordingly morphed from a platform for a contrarian know-it-all into a round-the-clock acid reflex.

Deploying insults that she doesn’t always appear to fully understand, Caruana Galizia’s antagonists are now variously dismissed as slags, whores and chavs, among a panoply of other decidedly adolescent put-downs.

And it should go without saying that Caruana Galizia has still not located the exact whereabouts of her reverse gear. The bloody-minded tend to bear this unidirectional condition with pride, and Caruana Galizia must be in the running for some of award from the fraternity for her unremitting perseverance in battle.

That the ability to go backwards is not in of itself a bad thing, however, is a piece of wisdom quite unappreciated at Running Commentary. Even standing still is viewed with suspicion there, as the hundreds of verbose retorts to readers’ comments in bold black print attest.

Putting these quibbles to one side, however, there is no denying that Caruana Galizia is the closest thing Malta has to a proper columnist. Her newspaper articles are usually well-argued and mercifully light on disheartening attempts at wit and rambling insider-y references.

Her blog, meanwhile, is another matter. In addition to the qualitative shortcomings that inevitably come with this unmediated off-the-cuff format (see this blog, for starters), Running Commentary has facilitated the debasement of public discourse in Malta, not least by enabling the creation of the colossally foul and stupid Taste Your Own Medicine site.

But just because Caruana Galizia’s abuse is spelled correctly and more grammatical, it doesn’t necessarily make it any more worthy.

Malta is a special needs case when it comes to Internet debate, as the comments section under any widely-read Times of Malta article effectively demonstrates. This is why the country really needs its only effective columnist to cease indulging in petty verbal mud-wrestling, which only serves to engender a spiral of noxious mutual sniping.

It is easy to imagine how grating such an appeal would be to Caruana Galizia, were she to read it. She would bridle at the suggestion that her prominent role in Maltese public life puts her under some obligation to act as an arbiter for standards in debate.

But, simply put, she would be wrong.

If it isn’t too histrionic to suggest, I would argue that once we get stuck down this stygian Internet rabbit-hole of petty, scurrilous name-calling, the country is going to become a worse place.

Vlad’s original post can be found at Fool’s Cap.
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Zolabytes is a rubrique on J’accuse – the name is a nod to the original J’accuser (Emile Zola) and a building block of the digital age (byte). Zolabytes is intended to be a collection of guest contributions in the spirit of discussion that has been promoted by J’accuse on the online Maltese political scene for 5 years.

Opinions expressed in zolabyte contributions are those of the author in question. Opinions appearing on zolabytes do not necessarily reflect the editorial line of J’accuse the blog.
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Categories
Politics

Catch Up

We did not need it, but we’ve got confirmation that even the most diehard of spin mouthpieces is suddenly realising that the PLPN system has led us to levels of mediocrity as never have been witnessed before. What future PLPN?

Continue reading “Catch Up”