Our political consciousness does not end at the white cliffs of Dover. Flickr/Mark Doliner. Some rights reserved.The general election campaign so far has been a miserable and myopic affair, even by the already low standards set by previous contests. Go down an average street across the UK and you’d be hard pressed to tell there’s an election on at all. No posters, no rallies (gosh how terribly un-British that would be) and no politicians trying to get our vote.
Much of what little passion and excitement there was in previous elections, from both the right and the left, was over global issues. The Tories tried to make the 2001 election about Europe. In 2005, it was the shadow of Iraq that pushed many solid Labour constituencies into the hands of the then ‘anti-war’ Liberal Democrats and led to George Galloway beating his Blairite Labour opponent in east London (whether you love him or hate him – it was Iraq wot done it). In 2010, the Conservatives, keen to get rid of their nasty party image pledged to uphold the 0.7% aid target.
Strange then, that politicians now seem to think that we only care about things that are happening on our doorstep. The scope of our political consciousness, we’re told, ends at the white cliffs of Dover (and arguably also at Hadrian’s Wall judging by rhetoric coming from some over the SNP). In the parallel universe of the election campaign, the rest of the world exists only as a source of “immigrants” who, despite stopping our public services from crumbling, are apparently the cause of all of our economic problems.
