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First week of UK election battle sees blank shots fired

Written by Rebecca Winson
Tuesday, 12 January 2010 00:00

The media kicked off the New Year with a host of inane lists detailing the noughties. Most quite rightly bemoaned the ridiculous and bewilderingly idiotic behaviour of politicians over the past ten years.

With a General Election due to be called sometime in spring, no-one should really have expected any of them to behave any differently. The first week of campaigning saw a fantastically ham-fisted and deceitful approach to the whole thing from both sides.

Saturday saw the Tories kick off proceedings with a press release from Shadow Culture Secretary Jeremy Hunt. Hunt revealed details of the party’s plans to create an “online platform” which will enable the public to help influence Tory policy. He asserted that this would help the party “resolve difficult challenges” thanks to the “wisdom of crowds”, a mystifying statement from a party which spent its last term in government fighting increasingly vicious battles with swathes of protestors and, eventually, hordes of poll tax rioters. Still, at least the idea presented the party as forward thinking –before a revelation from Andrew Mitchell that, foreign aid plans would be imperialistically structured around the Daily Mail’s favourite organisation, the Commonwealth.

On Monday morning, Labour held its first press conference of 2010. Alistair Darling stiltedly read out a speech clearly written by somebody else whilst bewildering the audience with his eyebrows. He then proudly revealed a long thought out sound bite – a £34bn “credibility gap” in Conservative spending plans. He was seemingly forgetting that people sitting on billions of pounds worth of national debt shouldn’t throw stones. A Guardian journalist spotted holes in Darling’s calculations minutes after being handed the figures, and asked the Chancellor for some clarifications. Alistair and his facial hair completely failed to answer properly and descended into a quandary of newspeak babble.

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