The Unrelenting Tedium of Modern British Politics

Ok, so regular readers will have clocked that there has been limited writing about politics on this blog of late. Indeed, there have only really been sporadic updates that, when they do come, tend to be on much more geeky subjects that what passes for the political mainstream in this country. The reason for this is simple; modern British politics is beyond boring. And anyone who disagrees should take a look at the recent party conference season.

The party conferences have long been lacklustre commercials for whichever party happens to be fawning in front of the media in a given week. I don't doubt that a lot of effort is put into those conferences - the problem is that they all end up being largely indistinguishable from one another. But you don't even have to look at the content - vapid and largely non-existence as it may be - of those conferences to see just how massively shite modern British politics has become, since the leaders of each of the three main parties seemed happy to condense the mediocrity of the incumbent incarnations of their party into one short (yet always still too long) speech.

Clegg seemed to be reminding his party that there is a point to being in political power after they had spent a few days bashing their coalition partners and confirming every cliche that the Lib Dems have never really wanted to be in power when it came down to it. The odious little turd Miliband Minor made a speech that sounded like a chipped checklist of things it might be nice to have a party leader say if that party leader didn't actually want to say anything after all. The only two noteworthy bits of his speech came when he bashed Blair (yeah, he's a cunt, but he won three elections for your party, Ed m'boy, whereas you're on course to win zero) and when he seemed to set himself up as the final arbiter of what constitutes ethical business. I don't think there is anything wrong with people deciding which business match their idea of what is good - I think we all do this, all the time - but I do have a problem with Ed Miliband (a man who, lest we forget, has never done anything other than work as a politician really) in power deciding which businesses it would be good to punish on a whim. Finally, we had Cameron delivering the sort of speech he was born to deliver - an ad man's speech full of blandishments and empty cant. His speech seemed to be designed to offer vague yet meaningless hope in dark economic times, at the same time as avoiding saying anything that might, well, be worth hearing. The fact that it failed to convince even the party faithful that he is on the right course should come as no surprise - the only course he has actually sketched out is that he's really like to stay in power for the foreseeable, if that's not too much hassle. And given the performance of his two main rivals, he'll probably get his wish.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not disenchanted with politics as a concept - I'd just argue that, whatever these terrible, tedious men thing they are indulging in, it isn't politics. Rather we are seeing the dragging on of a tedious, real life soap opera of watching three contradictory, self-serving parties vying for a power that they have no real intention of using in any meaningful way even if they are elected. So you'll have to forgive me if I can't get too excited about modern politics, and you'll have to forgive me if posting remains irregular moving forward and instead focuses on things I actually find interesting. Modern British politics has become about the perpetual performance of meaningless political posturing; the world's worst political drama, played out in real life. It is House of Cards without the plot; The West Wing without the interesting characters. As such, it is only worth paying the most scant and fleeting attention to in this day and age.