Three days is a long time in politics

It was Harold Wilson who said that a week was a long time in politics and even though, as I write this, we are not quite 72 hours in to the General Election campaign, I’ve had enough of it already. Every TV I walk past, every newspaper I pick up, every website I glance at is droning on about the election, which I understand is their thing, it’s what they do.

But the campaign itself is dull as. The Falklands War was described as two bald men fighting over a comb and I think the 2010 General Election is much the same. Make it two-and-a-half bald men if you count the Lib Dems. The sad fact is that politicians in the major parties have more in common with each other than they do to differentiate themselves. Hence their tedious, meaningless campaign slogans. They remind me of the crap adverts for Petroc, which those with any sense will know as North Devon College. The adverts pick three words and stack them up over each other.

It looks something like this:

CONCEIVE
INSPIRE
ACHIEVE

Or maybe like this:

ARTICULATE
PENETRATE
EJACULATE

Anyway, nobody really did it better than the Japanese motorcycle industry as it began to overtake the British version. They simply said:

ADOPT
ADAPT
IMPROVE

What has any of this to do with the General Election? Well, nothing really, but that’s how difficult I’m finding it to focus on something which is either so important we should all concentrate on it to the exclusion of all else, or means so little that we might as well study the entrails of roadkill to determine where we are headed. As they say in the Big Brother house: “You decide.”