FraserWords

IT seems scarcely believable that today, we enter a General Election campaign just like any other General Election campaign. Labour says the Tories wreck the Health Service, which is true, but then so do Labour. The Tories say Labour will put up taxes, but then so do the Tories. The Liberals say they’ll work with anybody and a few other things I didn’t quite catch. It could be any year.

It’s utterly staggering that these non-entities – the Camerons and Cleggs, the Milibands and Osbornes, the Balls and Mays – are not accepting that the political climate in this country has moved on from the crass cliches of the last 75 years.

It’s utterly staggering that these people believe anybody has the tiniest remaining shred of respect for them, or belief in the lies they peddle: Osborne’s ludicrous ‘we’re all in this together’ schtick, Clegg’s ‘trust me’ plea, Balls’s ‘I can count, honest’. Same shits, different day.

While all this nonsense was going on today, the world was ignoring a political party that is actually putting forward proposals, and involving people in its policies: as Tories and Labour pointed their suits at each other and argued about taxes and borrowing, the Green Party enlisted a small army of public supporters at train stations the length and breadth of the country, in demonstrations demanding that our railways be re-nationalised.

They have won the argument already, of course: it’s just a question of building the power. It will come, because people are sick and tired of paying massive sums of money for a sub-standard service.

Only businessmen, the rich, shareholders and right-wing dogmatists still believe that public service should be delivered by private enterprise. The rest of us have had our eyes, not our bank accounts, open for the last 40 years and have seen what damage a venal bunch of greed-mongers can do to the things on which we depend. Trains, buses, telecoms, power supply, water – every one of them, and more besides, sold off to pay for tax cuts and now delivering a service that is a), appalling and b), expensive.

(It reminds me of one of Humph’s lines on the immortal I’m Sorry I Haven’t a Clue: a customer service questionnaire asked how a train passenger rated the service: ‘Was it a), poor, b), very poor or c) eye-wateringly piss-poor?’)

I often wonder quite how much support the Greens would have across the country if our media had deigned to offer them the same level of exposure they have granted to Nigel Farage’s UKIP. Every time UKIP has uttered one of its thinly-veiled racist scare stories to rally the bewildered bigot, the Green Party has uttered a proper proposal. Yes, a proposal at which the right would sneer, but a proper policy suggestion, not a threat or a fright. Guess which one has got the coverage? Of course, loathe UKIP and all it stands for as we do, we must still acknowledge that they, like the Greens, have tapped into the deep well of public dislike of the status quo. In Scotland, the Scottish Nationalists have achieved the same.

But for all that, as the General Election kicks off, there can be no doubt that the old yah-boo-sucks nonsense of the last 50 years will be permitted to proceed completely unchanged – not by the half of the country that votes, for some of us will indeed vote for change, but by the half of the country that can’t even be bothered.

By May the same people, the same faces, the same suits will be on the screens. There’ll be new Labour and Liberal leaders following Ed’s and Nick’s failures, obviously, and only a Tory majority will save Bumface from the wrath of the blue rinses and bigots. But we will still be governed by a set of mediocrities for whom a tiny minority of the population actually voted and in whom none of the population have any faith at all.

There you have it: Old Fraser’s Almanack for 2015. If I were you, I’d ignore all this Dry January nonsense and reach for the bottle now – start as you will need to go on amid an election campaign.