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Election fatigue.


As the day draws nearer a feeling of ennui descends over Coastalblog towers. The ineivitable consequence of a five year fixed term parliament. Too much foreplay and eventually you start wondering what’s on telly.

The problem for me is the politics of repetition. The same lines, the same messages, banged out again and again. I don’t doubt that it’s done as all sides consider it the most effective strategy, but it’s tedious in the extreme. But (sigh) it works.

Consider the Tory lie that the financial crisis was a result of labour overspending. If you can cast your mind back a few years to the heady days of 2007/8 you will no doubt be able to recall that it was nothing of the sort. You will recall a global financial crisis caused by the greed and criminality of a banking elite and the foment and fervour of an overheated housing market. You will further recall George Osborne being opposed to the actions taken by Gordon Brown and Alistair Darling which, as it turned out, stopped the whole thing being much worse.

Well, your memories, as it turn out, are wrong. Or at least they are according to Conservative election policy, which has been to bang on about the deficit, over and over, linking it inextricably with Labour. Over and over. Deficit. Debt. Labour. Bad. Deficit. Debt. Labour. Bad. Got that monkeys? Got that in your heads now? It may not actually be, y’know, true. It may also be true that Osborne has borrowed A QUARTER OF A TRILLION POUNDS more than he said he would. But still. Deficit. Debt. Labour. Bad.

As this particularly egregious example displays, it’s effective. Not that I’m blaming just the tories, if I hear Nick Clegg use the word “stability” one more time I fear a part of my brain will dissolve. Likewise Farage and immigration. Sturgeon and Trident. God help me even labour and the sainted NHS. I can’t take another photo op of Andy Burnham nodding sympathetically at a nurse. I know it’s important, but in each case it simply feels like some policy wonk in a bunker has crunched some numbers and gone “This is it, this is the issue we can win on, now bang on and on and on about this, and nothing but this. Ad nauseam, people” And so we continue with the same lines, the same phrases, the same rote responses until even those of us who do actually genuinely give a hoot about the outcome are whimpering in a corner. Begging for it to end

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