Flourishing in Shadow

The first piece of genuine election propaganda has arrived, from the United Kingdom Independence Party. I have also received a leaflet from the Conservatives, but that was before the election had been called, albeit at a point when the orgasm was decidedly building. The Conservatives have evidently ditched Andrew Mennear as insufficiently concerned with the modern Conservative values of slickness and glossiness, and their candidate this time is one Mike Freer, whose slick and glossy leaflet was "Printed and delivered at no cost to the taxpayer", the negative being in red. The rest of the text is white, the background blue and the nearby Tory Oak green, which may or may not constitute a chromatic tribute to the flag of Belize. The leaflet includes an interview with Daveybloke, who is shown in a candid pose which must have taken ages to get right, looking through some papers with a faintly disgusted expression on his face. "David Cameron at work in his House of Commons office", says the caption, in case we thought he was playing darts or supping Guinness from a can. The interview is the usual blather about the need to cut everything except frontline services, the need to freeze public sector pay in order to protect jobs, the need to ringfence NHS spending so that the taxpayer can make an appropriate contribution towards NHS privatisation, the need to be tough on crime and tough on the causes of crime (by "strengthening families, reforming schools and getting people back to work", thus getting rid of all the divorce, education and benefit claimants which have wrecked our once mighty economy. Mike Freer used to be a banker) and the need for cleaner sources of energy, partly because of the planet and floods and things but mostly because it's profitable: "above all, there will be a multi-trillion pound global market for green goods in the years to come". Daveybloke is asked about the London Haystack but scoots hurriedly away and onto the more comfortable subject of punishing people.

The UKIP leaflet is mercifully shorter, but has a ghastly yellow-and-purple colour scheme and a logo consisting of a £ sign where the middle stroke has been replaced by the letters UKIP. They may burble on about immigrants, crime and, well, about immigrants and crime, but their only real interests are keeping the monarch's head on the stamps and keeping the pound sterling as it was in the days of Churchill, Shakespeare and Alfred the Great. They also believe, it appears, that crime is out of control (it isn't), that the Human Rights Act is a criminals' charter (it isn't), and that councils and police are persecuting motorists (they aren't). We are promised "zero tolerance on crime and criminals"; although there is a regrettable lack of specifics, so it's difficult to tell whether, for example, UKIP intends doing anything Nurembergian with Tony and his chums. Since Nuremberg is a foreign place like the Hague and the United Nations, it seems unlikely. Anyway, while crime is being wiped off the face of the earth (by taking police away from motorist persecution activities and putting them back on the beat), UKIP will also "give much more help to the most vulnerable in society - children, elderly and the disabled", presumably by redistributing the £45 million a day which at the moment is being "wasted" in Brussels. This would enable us to "give young people student grants not student loans", and would also ensure that the student grants were in real pounds not euros, which would be very jolly indeed.