Hastings, the town where I was born and near which I live, is a marginal seat (Labour majority of 2,000). Since the election was called, I have been visiting it to ‘take the temperature’. I follow a canvass, or stop people in the street and ask their opinion. In the first week, Labour was unpopular, the Tories were tepidly favoured and the Liberal Democrats were barely mentioned. This week, after the effects of the previous Thursday’s leaders’ debate, Labour was unpopular, the Tories were tepidly favoured, and the Liberal Democrats were up. Out of ten people I approached, one had deserted Labour for the Tories, one had deserted Labour for abstention, one had done the same for the Tories, and one had left Labour for the Liberals because of Nick Clegg’s television performance. The rest were staying put. A Kurdish waiter, standing on top of a large rubbish bin to flatten cardboard boxes for recycling, shouted down to me that the only one worth anything was Tony Blair. Then I went to a crowded hustings meeting in a church. ‘Most of you remember the War,’ declared the Ukip candidate. Even in Hastings, this is not true. Michael Foster, the sitting, popular Labour MP, spoke. He was roundly booed about the deficit, but otherwise convinced people with his decency and humour. The Conservative candidate, Amber Rudd, was uncomfortable with the issues about faith and marriage which the rather godly audience raised. She was better on debt, government interference in teaching, voluntary work, and business, and the ‘tax on jobs’. Nick Perry, the Liberal Democrat, was the least practised speaker, but he was the only one proud of his own party’s manifesto, the only one feeling that his lot had nothing to apologise for. Obviously, this is because his party has never done anything but, in the eyes of significant numbers of voters, this is not a great objection. As the Tories correctly worked out before all this, people want, above all, a change. But they are so fed up that they include in what they want changed absolutely everything which they associate with power in this country. Unfortunately for the Tories, that still includes them.
On the morning after last Thursday’s leaders’ debate, I asked the Tory high command who was in charge of their Liberal Democrat unit, so that I could find out more details on how they proposed to counter-attack. I was told that such a unit did not exist. The Conservatives had been facing the wrong way, like the guns at Singapore. This is a powerful example of what happens when an organisation comes to believe its own propaganda. Under David Cameron, the Tories have quite rightly tried very hard to woo Liberal voters (they call it ‘love-bombing’). With an eye to southern and West Country marginal seats, they tried to efface many of their more Gothic features which put potential Liberal defectors off. In this they were successful. But their success seems to have led them to believe that they could — even should — neglect the traditional political art of studying your opponent’s weaknesses. Now they are terribly exposed. There is a dreadful vanity in any political party which thinks that it should not go in for ‘negative campaigning’. One’s opponents invariably have negatives, and each party owes it to itself and to the public to point them out. The Tories rely on the press to do their dirty work. We like dirty work, but there are limits, set by idleness if not by morality. Studying the Lib Dem manifesto is not something to which we can be expected to stoop.
Another reason to be in Hastings was to attend my ‘case management hearing’ at the town’s Magistrates’ Court. These are pre-trial meetings to ascertain roughly what each side is going to say. I am charged (see several previous Notes) with television licence evasion. My plea is not guilty, and my grounds are that the BBC was in breach of its Charter in broadcasting Jonathan Ross’s obscene telephone calls to Andrew Sachs and then failing to sack him. It is also in breach of Article Nine of the European Convention of Human Rights, levying a hypothecated tax which abridges one’s freedom of conscience. I won’t pay my licence fee again until Ross ceases to be paid by the Corporation (July). The clerk asked me to outline my case to the magistrate in the hearing, but as I did so, I could see what I might politely call a faraway look enter her eyes. Would an hour and half do to sort this one out, she asked after a bit. I said I didn’t know, but did not argue. The date for trial is set for Monday 10 May.
In Cities of London and Westminster, where, as well as in Sussex, I have a vote, an election address arrives from the Labour candidate, David Rowntree. He has hardly any policies. His entire front page reads:
‘I am a different kind of politician. I will:
– Have a fully staffed office accessible to everyone
– Hold regular weekly surgeries open to all my constituents
– Be out and about every week meeting and listening to local people.’
Mr Rowntree is, as he tells us, the drummer in Blur: ‘Thanks to that I am in a position to make myself heard in ways that others might not be able to.’ The whole document is a modern version of the 19th-century belief in ‘men, not measures’. I find it so sweet that I almost want to vote for him.
These are straitened times, but I am still surprised by a letter, a copy of which has just reached me. It is from the British High Commissioner in Kenya, and it is about the Queen’s Birthday party, the traditional British equivalent of other countries’ national day, when our embassies all over the world give an annual garden party. In 2010, says the High Commissioner, R.N.P. Macaire, ‘the very great pressure on government spending, and increasing public scrutiny of such spending, casts into question whether we will be able to hold one this year.’ His solution is to hold the party ‘with support from the private sector’, and make sure that it is ‘good value to its commercial sponsors’. For a maximum of £1,000 each, members of ‘a select group of British-linked companies’ can sponsor the party. In return, they will get ‘visual branding’, ‘logos included with the formal invitations’ and ‘a mention in speeches and press release’. The guests with whom sponsors mingle will be ‘Kenya’s top business leaders, opinion-formers, ministers, MPs, civil society and the diplomatic corps’. So cash-for-access is now the stated policy of HMG.
The volcanic ash story shows us paralysed by our anxiety about safety. We need to start a sort of parallel society in which you are allowed to do all sorts of things — fly, smoke in pubs, etc — so long as everyone involved signs an ‘at your own risk’ form.
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