The 2017 General Election is tomorrow. Some thoughts.
This is very much squeaky bum time, as all polls show a narrowing of Mrs May's previously unassailable lead, and some of them show the race to be very close. How have the Tories come within an ace of throwing it away?
Firstly, the press has hated the Tories' boring election campaign. It may have protected Mrs May from exposure as a charisma-free zone, but it gave journalists nothing to write about. So they wrote that May was wooden and reclusive instead. When the Tory manifesto turned out to have plans for dementia care which were unfair and attacked the middle-classes, they leapt on the discovery. When May did a U-turn they leapt on that too.
The fact that the social care plan represented a genuine and courageous (if misguided) attempt squarely to face an intractable problem got lost in the media glee.
That's pretty much all the stick the press has had with which to beat the Tories, but boy have they wielded it hard and frequently.
Now contrast Labour. The deficiencies of the Party's manifesto and leadership are so vast that as a journalist you wouldn't quite know where to begin. Taxes? The party is putting them up, despite evidence that doing so tends to bring in less, rather than more, revenue. The nation's finances? Labour is going to borrow and borrow in a fiscal situation that is already parlous; breaking even is always a "rolling" five years away. Tuition fees? Labour is going to abolish them, largely for the benefit of middle-class kids, at a cost of £10 billion. Terrorism? Labour encouraged multiculturalism, is too terrified of racism accusations to make hard decisions, is in hock to the Islamic vote, and is led by people who can't quite seem to decide (vide the IRA and Hamas) which terrorists are OK and which aren't. National security? Mr Corbyn won't press the nuclear button. Brexit? The party is utterly divided on the issue, and the manifesto says that even a bad deal for Britain is better than no deal (I bet M. Barnier was rubbing his hands when he heard that one).
For journalists there is so much material to go on that the mind reels at Labour's inadequacies. To be clear, I'm not saying the press as a whole is pro-Labour (only some of it is); merely that the deficiencies of the Tory campaign (dullness, social care) pale into insignificance compared to those of the Labour manifesto. But both deficiencies have been given equal emphasis.
And this is a crucial difference. Mr Corbyn has proved a capable stump campaigner. After all, he's spent his political lifetime campaigning rather than governing. Labour's campaign has been quite good, although its manifesto is a monstrous, gleaming pile of unaffordable crap. The Tory campaign on the other hand has been ill-judged; but their manifesto is on the whole sensible and realistic. If I had to point to a failure of reportage it would be that the press hasn't distinguished the two things (manifesto vs. campaign) well or at all.
But if Labour wins, or, God forbid, there is a hung parliament, it won't be because of the press. It will be because enough people took Labour's promises seriously, in particular perhaps its tuition-fee bribe of the young, who don't just have short memories but no memories of pre-Thatcherite Britain. For those of us who consider even a lacklustre May infinitely more persuasive than Corbyn, our hope must be that the young won't turn out to vote and that the reports from party foot-soldiers - who say that Labour is doing really well in the big cities but terribly everywhere else - turn out to be true. Otherwise we are all fucked.
Voting is about the choice between two evils. Let's hope the lesser of the two wins then implements the Boundary Commission report a.s.a.p.
