SHOCK! Peter Oborne makes good TV

I've just watched the best hour of TV I've seen on the subject of the election since the campaign began. It was a Channel 4 documentary presented by Peter Oborne called 'Election Unspun : Why Politicians Can't Tell the Truth'. The Channel 4 website appears to have no information on the programme, despite a large section devoted to election coverage, and for all I know Oborne may have hijacked the transmission room at gunpoint to get the damn thing broadcast (although as it was in the Dispatches series and is listed in the Radio Times I presume not). Anyway, the essence of the programme's argument is distilled in a recent Spectator article by Oborne. In essence, the arguments are as follows:

• All three major parties' policies on several key issues - taxation, law and order, health, education - are so similar as to render any concept of 'democratic choice' meaningless'.
• Party leaders and other senior politicians are doing their best to avoid the public, concentrating on stage-managed private rallies and photo ops.
  
• Canvassing, by door-to-door or mailshot, is aimed at a tiny number of swing voters in key marginals identified by using sophisticated software which was developed in the US.
  
• Consequently, non-marginal voters are responding to the parties' lack of interest in kind, by not giving a flying f***.
  

It has not previously been possible to find an abundance of praise for a fluffed up overgrown Tory quail like Peter Oborne in this blog, or any other Hal Berstram prose for that matter. But P.O. did superb work over 60 minutes in this documentary. He made a very strong case that parties were simply chasing each others' tails on the key issues, with the initial running being made by focus groups. As has long been known, focus groups do not deliver a coherent and rational impression of voters' views of important political issues. This is because voters are sometimes wildly inconsistent. For example, they would like to pay less tax (or at least no more tax), but they would also like better public services. And while we're at it we'll have more bobbies on the beat as well please. Who wouldn't? (There was a superb cameo from Polly Toynbee who pointed out that it has been calculated that a policeman on foot in the average UK street is likely to come within 100 yards of a crime being committed once every 9 years.) The result? All three parties say they have no plans to raise tax (on the average voter anyway), plan to increase spending, and will find the extra money by cutting at least £22 billion of 'waste' in the public sector. But to play the hardman for a moment, if it's that easy to cut waste and the voters like it, why haven't they done it already? Because it's - on the face of it - a nonsense, that's why.

Oborne went out to Stansted, where a second airport runway is due to be constructed in the next couple of years, to show that when a policy for instant gratification with mass appeal - cheap air travel for all - runs up against a policy that is essential in the long run but requires hard sacrifices in the short run - reducing global warming - it's the instant gratification that wins out every time. None of the major three parties is proposing a tax on aviation fuel, either nationally or internationally, despite the dire warnings of the consequences of unchecked growth in air miles for the environment.

Frankly, the whole thing made me inclined to vote Green. Not because they have any chance of winning but because if enough people do that (especially on a low turnout) it will certainly dispel the notion that the 'minor parties' can never make any difference to the one-and-two-halves party system we've had in one guise or another since '83. I still believe that the underlying differences between all 3 parties are a lot larger than Peter Oborne will admit, but then his thesis - intriguingly - is that there is no underlay; with an ever higher number of ideologically bereft 'career politicians' and dwindling grass-roots party membership, presentation is content. Assuming for the rest of this post that he's right (it's too long already to do otherwise), I can see three ways out of the present impasse;

a) the Lib Dems achieve the balance of power in a hung parliament and force through proportional representation (which would make the marginal voter far less easy to identify under most configurations, particularly with five or six parties represented in Parliament).

b) turnout levels drop so far that mobilised grassroots campaigns for minor parties or independent candidates begin to achieve widespread success.

c) The conventional democratic process collapses as anyone with an axe to grind and either a tractor or a caravan.

Of these, (a) is most likely in the short to medium term (not as short as "10 days", though, sadly). (b) is intriguing but unpredictable. (c) sounds like good terrain for a free festival, but won't be (free, or festive).

Enough already. The future awaits.