Saturday, July 01, 2006

Honesty in Politics?

I won't bore you with my expert analysis on the World Cup, but suffice it to say that the whole of Year 8 start penalty practice on Monday in case any of them ever get into the England team. My heart particularly goes out to Lampard who had a rotten World Cup.

The worst thing about it was that I didn't watch it alone. Whenever you see international football matches with other people, two things are certain. Firstly I have to pretend that I know more about the whole football thing than I do. And secondly there will always be somebody (they are self nominating) who could have done better if only yesterday the FA has sacked Sven and appointed them instead. Mind you, I think that about me and the government. Anyway, the heat, alcohol and football disaster haven't made for a great night.

I have stopped short of making comment about the Bromley by-election result. I am now going to do so because tonight I have watched Bob Neill's victory speech and Ben Abbotts (who?) losers speech on the BBC Player. Clearly it was a close run thing and the Conservatives did do badly. I'll leave it to conservativehome and Party Chairman Francis Maude to work out why. However the style of campaigning interests me.

People always tell me that they prefer positive campaigning - and really want to talk out policies. However, when the LibDems run a campaign based entirely on slagging off another candidate they don't suffer any loss of votes. The LibDems are dirty, nasty campaigners (as their briefing guide from LibDem HQ tells them to be). Yet people treat them like political virgins. If people really hate negative campaigning, why don't the LibDems lose more by-election campaigns? Or is it that negative campaigning works? Voters say one thing and do another. I wonder how many people vote 'for' something rather than 'against' something else?

Because of the campaign that he ran, I hope Ben has a short but obscure career in his third party and that he loses even his council seat soon. I admire a lot of people on all sides of politics and he is certainly not one of them.

One Tory activist who made several trips to Bromley from Norfolk told me that he thought that people lied more on the doorsteps there than he had ever seen before. Why do people lie? It only makes more parties disturb you on more occassions. If you told party X to sod off they'd never knock on your door again. If you tell party X, Y and Z you are going to vote for all 3, you'll endure three lots of direct mail, three lots of leaflets and three lots of knocking up. Yet people continue to do so - if you are really afraid of the canvasser, just say you don't want to say, rather than fib.

On a similar vein, apparently the public don't like punch & judy politics, especially at PMQs. So when punch & judy are absent do they accuse preceedings of being boring?

Rather like the LibDems, it seems a lot of people say one thing and do another. Maybe it is time for everyone to be a bit more honest in politics?

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

If politicians were honest we'd descend into anarchy.