British politics – the calm before the constitutional storm?
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Version 0 of 1. The demonstrators outside Chatham House were not, it turned out, making the point that Nicola Sturgeon was jaundiced. I checked. The yellow masks of Scotland’s first minister were a rotten print job. The six quiet souls with a small budget and obvious placards – “Dance to my Tune Ed” – were there to save the union. Shouldn’t St James’s Square have been packed with demonstrators, with tulips trampled and police horses holding back the crowds? Where were the banners and loud speakers? Something big is happening here. A kingdom is at stake. But to this visitor’s eye, these mute demonstrators seem to catch the mood of the 2015 campaign. I’m not talking about Scotland. Pride and enthusiasm are on the march up there. But politics isn’t swamping newspapers and television down south. It’s so quiet, so tidy. Much of the time, an election seems hardly to be happening at all. What a relief it was to see on the road to Ramsgate a fence draped with cheap tinsel and placards for Nigel Farage. Finally, here was evidence of an election. Farage is nothing if not an old timer. But all I’ve seen in London are a few shy posters and placards. Where is the chaotic mess of a general election? Politics in this country has become indoor work. This week David Cameron was campaigning in a creche in Surbiton and a factory in Bedford that supplies log cabins to the British. And today, in the basement of Chatham House, Ed Miliband was giving – in remarkably general terms – an account of Labour’s foreign policy. His jaw works hard. He jokes and mugs. There is an eagerness to the man which may, in office, prove especially tedious. He is not least prime ministerial in his skill at sidestepping questions, especially those he first declares to be “incredibly serious”. Once commended, they are barely addressed. Both Miliband and Cameron are doing their best to project the keynote calm of England. At Bedford on Tuesday, rattling off tax and pension figures, the prime minister seemed not to have a care in the world. He could hardly have thought his maths lesson was winning the hearts of the assembled workers. But by God he was projecting calm. Not so, half an hour later on the platform at Bedford station, chewing his lip and looking distracted. The facade had slipped. Even with both hands deep in his pockets Eton-style, he seemed deeply uneasy. No wonder: the best outcome public polls are offering him at this point is stalemate followed by constitutional confusion. You might think this looming mess would excite the electorate. But the people of Britain appear to be embracing it willingly. It’s not changing their minds. They’re not doing anything about it. For weeks the polls have barely budged. Voters seem not even to have changed their minds whether to vote at all. The Scots, we are told, will turn out to a man and woman. Not so the English. Sometime in the 1990s came a great slump in voting. Nothing about this campaign is encouraging the English to turn out in greater numbers on 7 May. The prediction is that less than 70% of voters will bother to go to a ballot box. And the young, who might resolve the coming logjam, will barely vote at all. With no sign of a last-minute surge coming to the government’s rescue, Conservative tacticians have begun to talk of tiny shifts yet saving Cameron: shifts of as little as 1% in the right seats. The tacticians are keeping hope alive, and getting stuck into the Scottish National party. How curious that, having run out of other races to attack, they are turning once again on the Scots. The tacticians swear Cameron is taking care to distinguish between Nicola Sturgeon’s party and the people north of the Tweed. But it’s a delicate business when her party will carry nearly ever seat in Scotland. But even this appeal to ancient hatreds – “They’re coming, they’re coming and their faces are blue” – seems not to have excited the electorate much. Calm still reigns, calm and a strange willingness in the electorate to leave to politicians and constitutional lawyers the task of solving the problems of 8 May. Calm is so British. We admire it. We buy posters extolling its virtues. But this isn’t the war. This is the calm that descends in the moments before a terrible accident, when time stands still, things work in slow motion and nothing, it seems, can be done to stop the truck hitting the cliff. What about a march, a rally, politicians rousing their troops in town hall meetings? What about a hundred demonstrators in yellow Sturgeon masks embarrassing Miliband in St James’s Square? What about a strategy that engages the national imagination to fix the coming confusion before it happens? The polls can shift in a fortnight but at this point Britain is plodding to the end when an old woman will tot up the figures that tell her who gets the first chance to govern Britain. We trust she’s calm. The nation is going to have to be, too. It could be a long and trying business. David Marr is a commentator, political correspondent and biographer. Based in Sydney, he is in the UK to follow the general election as it reaches its conclusion. |