From an article by Dave Nellist recently published by ‘Coventry Advertiser’. The Advertiser is available free from garages and supermarkets throughout Coventry.
By the time you read this, it'll all be over. No, not Coventry's chance of reaching the play-offs (though regretfully, that also), but the BOGOF election. You could have been forgiven for not knowing that you were getting two elections for the price of one, given the lack of media coverage of local candidates and especially of the Council election. Many people didn’t know until they actually got to the ballot box and were issued two different coloured voting slips.
For example, for weeks up to the end of March we had acres of newsprint on the state of Coventry's roads, particularly the potholes, yet hardly an inch appeared in the first three weeks of the campaign about who might run the Council and what their priorities would be.
Now that suits the big parties, because they get coverage about their national campaigns in the General Election and hope that people's voting intentions rub off onto the local elections. But for smaller parties, or independents, particularly those only standing for the Council, it has meant they have been completely erased from the debate. And you have been denied the information about local candidates and their priorities - the people you actually being asked to vote for, because you don't actually vote for the party leaders.
The election, in fact, seems to have revolved around the 3 americanised Presidential TV debates. With days before each Thursday's event spent pontificating on what might happen, and then days afterwards analysing performances. But much of the ‘analysis’ has been at the level of ‘the colour of ties’, or hand gestures and body language. The important issues, in fact the most important issue, were successfully sidelined.
The truth is there is already a national coalition of ideas, if not yet of personalities. It developed before the election. The central idea is that the billions of pounds borrowed to save the bankers and their bonuses should be repaid out of the pockets and services of ordinary working class and middle class people and their families. I believe the equivalent of ‘potholes’ will appear across wide areas of education, housing, social and welfare provision as those cuts bite.
None of the three big parties will admit the details, because as one local Labour councillor said to me as we debated before a school in Coventry, 'no politician can tell the truth about the post-election public spending cuts, or they won't get elected'.
The Governor of the Bank of England reportedly said as far back as March, that spending cuts and tax rises after the election will be so severe that the party which implements them will be so unpopular they won't win another general election for 20 years.
It also might mean that whatever mix of MPs have been elected, their overlapping agenda will be so unpopular that we might not have to wait another 5 years before the next General Election. Let's hope the seriousness of the recession, and the options for dealing with it, gets wider debate next time.
