Firstly let me apologise. As an ex politics and current philosophy student things like this really matter to me:
Only 9 days before a European election (and incidentally a year before the next general election), all I have had posted through my letterbox is UKIP tosh, two identical leaflets (one entirely superfluous) of Tory counter-tosh and one genuinely informative leaflet from the Green Party.
As a marketing manager in a sector ever more strapped for cash I am by no means a normal advocate of mass produced leaflets but on this occasion, in a country where pub stool politics is being distributed by the political parties themselves, the politicians of this country need to buck their ideas up and make sure that the British electorate actually know what they are voting for.
UKIP's leaflet, the first to arrive by nearly three weeks, makes such deliberately misleading comments as "it's been
estimated that each family
could be at least £400 a year better off without the EU's agricultural and fisheries policy", "Outside the EU our Economy
could grow faster" (my emphasis) and the wonderfully over generalised statement that "anyone who says that 3 million jobs are at risk if we leave the EU is simply telling a big lie", which would be hilarious if I didn't suspect it is being believed, adopted and re-spouted in pubs and front rooms country wide.
The Tory counter-tosh leaflets do little more than argue about UKIP; only the Green Party have sent information about their policies and I have yet to receive anything from the Liberal Democrats or Labour.
Most of the electioneering around the upcoming European Elections (traditionally not well supported in the UK but the basis for much of UKIP's increasingly popular proselytising) is lazy and tabloid. However in a country where nearly 5 million copies of the top three selling tabloids are sold per month compared to just over 1 million copies of the three top selling broadsheets*, this strategy is not entirely surprising. It is not a massive leap to suggest that this means around five times as many people are being given simplistic and misleading information every day and that, judging by what has been posted through my letterbox, this mis-information is not being properly challenged by our political parties, who whilst we're at it, we elect to represent our views to higher governing bodies. If they can't even tell the voters what they stand for how on earth are they meant to represent our views?
I don't want to write an essay or get into a debate about the pros and cons of negative electioneering but
I urge those of you who have registeered to vote on 22 May to
find out who your candidates are and what they stand for as it seems that they are not necessarily going to tell you themselves.
*based on
this and not extensively researched yet (baby crying = only perfunctory research possible but you get the picture).
