Cheap point-scoring alive and well in the month of the dead
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At the end of February my wife and I settled down to dinner and offered a toast to the month of the dead. And why not?
After all, Prime Minister Gordon Brown had used his guest slot on a Valentine’s Day television chat show to play the family bereavement card while Tory leader David Cameron conjured a £20,000 tax dodge for the dead from his Pandora’s box of political tricks.
So over our third glass of wine (more than two qualifies as a political protest in our house) my wife and I decided the general election could be a dead heat, and certainly that the economy is heading for a dead end.
Or perhaps we should consign the future to mothballs like the Corus steel plant in Redcar? Mothballing seems to be the new rat word for killing an industry, although death without closure is hard to handle post-Diana.
I suppose the fate of Corus amounts to a virtual death, much like the virtual death of the Greek economy Eurosceptics also celebrated last month. Isn’t it good that our PM, in his Iron Chancellor persona, kept us out of the eurozone?
But I’m being too morose because February also marked a death to celebrate rather than mourn. I’m thinking of the death of the recession, or at least the publication of figures that indicated the start of a recovery.
Given the PM’s media ’Diana moment’ a TV election debate seems a tad out of kilter with the times. It may be more appropriate for politicians’ fate to be sealed by a sort of X-Factor phone-in
True, with gross domestic product in Q4 2009 growing at a miniscule 0.1% some may be inclined to describe the present condition more as flatlining. And with data showing that inflation leapt to 3.5% in January, for those of us who were around in the 1970s the word stagflation might spring to mind.
But the curious thing is that while February saw the death of serious political debate we face the prospect of Brown, Cameron and the Liberal Democrats’ leader Nick Clegg debating the big issues on telly as we approach the election. Given the PM’s media-based ’Diana moment’ this seems a tad out of kilter with our times. It would be more appropriate for the political fate of the trio to be settled by a sort of political X-Factor, with the outcome being decided by a phone-in.
And a quiz show might be an even better way of engaging the electorate.
A Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?-style format might do the trick. Questions could be posed such as - who recently said that repossession is sometimes the best way out for individuals struggling with their mortgages?
Was it (a) Grant Shapps, Tory shadow housing minister (b) Adam Applegarth, former chief executive of Northern Rock (c) John Healey, housing minister or (d) the Duke of Edinburgh?
Another question could be - which event did the government predict most accurately?
Was it (a) the millennium bug (b) bird flu (c) swine flu or (d) the recession?
Or - how many new homes did the government pledge to deliver by 2020?
Was it (a) 250,000; (b) 500,000; (c) one million or (d) three million?
Of course, the million-dollar question is which of our leading political personalities has the right answer to our country’s problems - and therein lies the mothballing of hope.
