Listening to three main party suits at various times last night on ‘5 Live’ was a surreal experience. All were engaged in that incredible performance of saying plenty without saying anything; of trying to stay ‘on message’ about ‘the economy’ and to defeat the attempts of the wily media to trip them up.
Completely unenlightening, deeply frustrating and an indicator of what is to come. And all of them (deliberately?) missing the elephant in the room.
Namely, why should we trust them anymore?
Muriel Grey said it so much better in an article in the Sunday Herald back in May last year.
“…Housing minister Margaret Beckett explained .. on an unusually lively BBC Question Time. You see, she is not actually greedy and selfish, someone who has exploited her position by manipulating crystal-clear rules of conduct to feather her own nest. No. It's the system, and she's jolly angry about it.
So is Ming Campbell. Oh, he's absolutely furious. How dare that system make him charge the taxpayer for all manner of things he wasn't morally due and end up making him look like a sanctimonious hypocrite. How that blasted system has let him down.
Even our own first minister. Yes, he's also terribly cross because it's the great Satan of Westminster's system that made him eat all the pies, when parliament wasn't sitting, and charge us for them. Such embarrassment would never happen in an independent Scotland. The system made him behave with such petty dishonour. Tuh! Bloody English.
Right, I'm bored now of sarcastic conceit. Let's get down to it. Have you ever, in your entire adult voting life, seen anything like this? Have you ever watched, open-mouthed, as so many people who have been caught betraying our trust with their paltry, venal, pathetic little schemes, stand blinking in the daylight and try to make us believe that they are victims?
It has been one of the most astonishingly illuminating tutorials in modern history of how politics works. Never mind what they did, or how they were caught, or what they plan to do about it. Just watch and listen to them, and then hold that memory close every time they apply the same skill to future declarations on everything from ID cards to war. It's breathtaking, and in some cases comes close to genius, but soul-scouringly depressing.
..we expect Tories to have their hands constantly in the till and peasants cleaning their moats. It was ever thus. But everybody else too? It's vile.” (Sunday Herald May 17th 2009)
Quite!
The main parties would all rather wish this breakdown in trust were far, far away so they can play lets pretend it is ‘situation normal’ - but it isn’t. It is here. And it is still ‘vile’.
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