A shorter Politics Decoded for you today in light of the House Rules series, which I contributed to yesterday and implore you to read!

2008 – not a classic so far…

It has been a terrible start to 2008 for politics. Sleaze is dominating the headlines, none of the parties can be particularly happy with their position in the polls; the electorate believes more and more that our MPs are a bunch of cheating, lying, and useless freeloaders. Even a story about the police bugging an MP is reflecting bad on them – why are they above the law? There are three groups of people we can blame for the negativity right now: The MPs themselves, the press and we the electorate.

We have it good

I stand by what I wrote yesterday on this blog – our MPs are up there with the best in the world. You only have to look any of the other continents to realise that Europe is the leader of politics in the world (compare and contrast with the usual fisty cuffs you see in Asian parliaments, the corruption and murder you see in African states, the criminal elements in South American politics and ask youself, would you really want to been in an electoral system that voted George Bush to power?!). And when you compare Britain with the rest of Europe, you start to realise that Italy is corrupt, Germany is too restrained and Eastern Europe is still coming out of the cold war years.

OK, that was a gross and somewhat lazy simplification, but you get the point. Britain is somewhere near the top when it comes to our representatives and our scandals are usually tame by comparison to many others!

The Problem

However, recent stories are not painting MPs as a wholly honest bunch. Some of them are clearly milking the system and we are paying for this. This has to end. The press do exaggerate things and, of course only print the exciting stories, but they are not making it all up. On the other hand, who would pick up a paper if the headline was “MPs are by and large a good and honest bunch”?! And we the public are to blame too – the electorate gets the government and MPs they deserve. We are struck by apathy. We only care about the economy and a few other major issues that really hit us directly. If the Labour government has their snouts in the trough, we don’t do anything about it come polling day. As long as our bank balances look good, that’s all that matters it seems.

It’s a vicious circle

The more MPs are found out doing wrong…

The more the press paint our MPs as bad…

The less interest we have in politics…

The less we do to tackle it…

The more MPs will get away with…

The downward spiral continues…

It’s the hangover of the Blair years

As for none of the parties being happy with their positions this year, well just look at the polls. Labour is stuck in the low 30s. Not good enough. The Tories are ahead, but not nearly as far ahead as they should given the bad press Labour have come under – they are not in a position to be confident of winning an election by a long, long shot. The Lib Dems have a new leader and are polling in the high teens low twenties – pretty standard.

Ladies & Gentlemen, welcome to the hangover of the Blair years. We have lost a leader who created the headlines with his personality yet fostered a culture of cynicism. Once you do away the glittering leader, all we are left with is the cynicism. Time for a change indeed… but what and who?

Garbo - http://thepoliblogs.blogspot.com/