This Election: 'How long, o Lord, how long?'

We have never had an election campaign like this before, because we have never had fixed-term Parliament. This unnecessary and foolish law, which has Clegg’s fingerprints all over it, took away the Prime Minister’s privilege of deciding the date. The subsequent campaign would last no more than six weeks.

 

Now the campaign drags on for months. And this one is particularly vacuous. It is policy-lite. We have been fed sound-bites, platitudes, clichés and Nuspeak.

 

The first duty of government is the defence of the realm. So what’s the defence policy of the three main parties? They are not telling us. It has not been mentioned.

 

Yet the world is becoming  increasingly dangerous. The Russian bear is prowling around the Baltic and taunting the RAF just outside UK airspace. ISIS has now spread to the southern shores of the Mediterranean. Cameron’s response has been to slash the military capacity of the UK to perilous levels.

 

The army is only a quarter of its size in the 1980s. The navy is at its smallest since the days of Henry VIII. The RAF admits that it does not have sufficient capacity to properly defend the country. The UK no longer conducts maritime surveillance because Nimrod  early warning aircraft was scrapped, so we can no longer track Russian submarines. It could be replaced by an American equivalent. The cost would be almost identical to the amount of foreign aid given to India.

 

But then we don’t have wars any longer; just ‘conflicts’ and ‘insurgencies’.

 

Only Farage seems to want to mention immigration despite the fact that it is near the top of the electorate’s agenda. Perhaps this is because Cameron is still being taunted with his 2010 promise to cut it to ‘tens of thousands’ when the latest figures show a gross increase of 500,000. The OBR predicts 300,000 over the next term. The plain fact is that the free movement of people within the EU means that control is impossible so long as Britain stays in the Club.

 

The Tories have a Long Term Economic Plan. Nobody is quite sure what is in it. Labour appears to have no economic policy at all apart from its usual tax-and-spend approach.

 

None of the parties seems to want to confront the real problem of governing Britain.

 

It is that the UK is over-centralised; the government is in too many places where it has no business to be, and all power is concentrated in Whitehall. The solution is to shift power to the lowest possible level. True, Osborne is moving in this direction with his plans to further empower Manchester, which brings us to ‘our’ NHS with Manchester being given a bigger role and large budget for health care.

 

The over-riding posture of the parties is ‘chuck more money at it’ which ignores the basic fact that the problems of the NHS are structural; a service that is ‘free at the point of delivery’ creates bottomless and unaffordable demand. The NHS is the world’s second largest employer. It is an unwieldy monolith. The solutions lie in charging for some services; shifting most care services elsewhere, such as to major local authorities where Manchester seems to be setting a precedent; and leaving the NHS to concentrate on hospital provision.

 

 

'So they  go on in strange paradox, decided only to be undecided, resolved to be irresolute, adamant for drift, solid for fluidity, all-powerful to be impotent'.