Pocket Full of Kryptonite

The spin doctors are weaving their webs everywhere. As fast as one side of the political contest magics up some miracle offering the other (for there are, really, only two) hauls out the green kryptonite to render it powerless. More money for the NHS? Pah, this barely goes to redress the balance following years of Tory cuts! Making society work for everybody? Yes, but it works best for Labour officials. Raising the National Insurance threshold to help the poorest? How will that help those who are too poor to even pay it?

Like every election before it we are – now the manifesti are finally published – engaged in a battle for supremacy between a motley collection of sub-heroes whose powers are nullified when the searing searchlight of truth is shone on them. Every utterance, every pledge, every ‘ambition’ withers under the light of inquiry, to be revealed as yet another false promise. Why do they do it? They can no more resist it than Superman can decline to save the planet. And everywhere the opposition’s Lex Luthers lie in wait ready to humiliate them.

Ian Lavery was banging on this morning, in ‘that’ accent, about re-ordering society to benefit the workers, but every such endeavour has previously failed because Labour believe in a zero sum game where in order to enrich poor people we have to ‘enpoor’ rich people. The trouble is the rich have their own personal supplies of kryptonite and deploy it at will to render impotent the powers of Taxman. Meanwhile the workers, who formerly gravitated towards Labour instinctively realise that their natural ally is any administration which will just let them work.

Let’s get the nation back to prosperity without the negative influence of the morass of confected workers’ rights which, once you have dealt with sick pay, holidays, a bit of maternity allowance and the right not to be exploited are as comprehensive as they need to be. Let’s ditch the ever-expanding suite of legislation that seeks to govern how we think and let’s stop giving every tiny voice a megaphone. Let’s recognise difference, accept it, accommodate it, work with it, but reserve the right to mock it, not endow it with super powers that prevent all criticism.

Let’s stop spinning every drawback as an opportunity and every entrepreneur as an evil exploiter of human capital. Let’s, usher in an age of honesty where the ordinary voter has a real choice between candidates who have been genuinely clear (not a politician’s ‘I have been clear’) about what they stand for and would be mortified if found out in a lie. Let’s, um, call a spade a spade and elect representatives who will do likewise. And let them stand on their honour or fall on their swords.

There are no super heroes here...

As it is, the disgraceful, dishonourable architects of Britain’s crooked, broken society are busily concocting illusions of smoke and mirrors to entice, but also to obfuscate and deceive. The artifice of representative democracy has been shown to be a villain’s charter, allowing MPs to be elected on one agenda, but serve another, to be of the people but for another people entirely. This festival of duplicity, this fête of fraud is not the open democracy which was so hard fought for. Under Westminster a humming noise is heard. it is Cromwell spinning in his unmarked grave.