The general election is less than 24 hours old and already we're seeing lies
galore. Earlier this week we saw the Conservative Party launch an attack
video, citing an interview on Good Morning Britain with Keir Starmer the Labour
MP. The thing is they completely misrepresented what he said.
Well Piers I have been talking to the EU, to
political leaders across the EU27 countries for three years...
And then there are the Liberal Democrats with their leaflets going through hundreds of
thousands of letterboxes across the country citing polls which are entirely
misleading of course that was entirely indefensible nobody would dare to say
that this is okay....unless they're Jo Swinson on Sky this Sunday.
I mean this is entirely misleading isn't it? It's embarrassing...
Politics has changed since the 2017 election...
Oh come on, you know this is embarrassing.
And then there was the Tories who chose to launch their general
election campaign through The Daily Telegraph comparing Labour's proposals
to increase the top rate of income tax to levels last seen under Margaret
Thatcher to Stalinism and the death of millions of people in the former Soviet
Union. Around the same time the Liberal Democrat's Luciana Berger was all too
eager to defend the Liberal Democrats pretending that a quote from them in
the Guardian was in fact an endorsement from the Guardian...does that make any sense?
It looked at first glance as if you were quoting the Guardian but
actually you're quoting your own leader in the Guardian who says that you're doing well.
And what she said is a fact.
Yeah but why suggest it's The Guardian saying that?
Well it's from The Guardian Newspaper, that's what it says underneath it...
I understand that but the point is you are potentially misleading.
So why, almost as soon as the general election campaign started have the Liberal
Democrats and the Tories seen themselves being defined by lies, half-truth and
generally speaking defending the indefensible?
You might say it's because they're bad people or they're simply talentless
politicians I wouldn't care to comment but I do have a theory which I think
generally underpins why both parties are behaving in the way that they
are. You see what we're seeing is a convergence of the collapse of centrist
politics more generally, which is a global phenomenon, converging with an
economic crisis in this country which has remained unaddressed for the last 11
years. On wages we've seen stagnation since 2008, a similar story with both
productivity and GDP per capita. Importantly home ownership in Britain is
at its lowest level since the mid 1980s now if you're a conservative that
matters because twentieth-century conservativism was built on a simple
promise: ever wider ownership of private property - the only thing being over the
last 10 years that's going backwards.
And a crisis more generally of political
legitimacy and defending the centrist status quo should be understood from
that economic vacuum. Liberal Democrats are simply unable to break with
neoliberalism and the same is true of the Conservative party despite their
often unhinged positions on cultural and social values and on Brexit. You saw
that in a bit of a bust up between Dominic Cummings and Sajid Javid in
Boris Johnson's brief tenure at Number 10, simply put the Tories don't want to
spend the kinds of money on the climate, on high streets and on public services
that are needed. You see Britain's in the middle of what's been called an organic
crisis: there's a crisis of its cultural norms, like I say of its economic model,
even of the Union which may potentially fragment over the coming years. Liberal
Democrats and the Tories don't have a solution to that, Labour do but because of
Brexit that was put on ice for the last two years. There's a reason why the
Conservatives didn't call another election since the summer of 2017
because they had the instinct, which is now being proven correct, that this would
happen that we'd talk about the precise issues that matter most to people: flat
lining pay, crumbling public services, homeownership and having a sense of
optimism and a future that might be better than today.
Whatever happens in this general election, and for what it's worth I think Labour will win, the Tories right
now remind me of Tony Blair's Labour in 2005: vacuous, bereft of ideas, no future
talent coming through the ranks. Which means something very important: the
future, if we choose to make it, is a socialist one and the longer this
general election goes on the better Labour will do. At the same time we'll see
more and more lies and mischaracterisations by the other two
leading parties. After all, what else have they got to offer?