the brilliantly leaping gazelle

Watching the final leaders debate on BBC1 last night, some of the things that I’ve mentioned on this blog throughout this election campaign made unwelcome appearances. It was nearly as a bad as me watching a hopeless yet earnest Pet Shop Boys tribute band doing a set comprised of all the songs of theirs that I least liked.

Plonker is still worrying incompetent as a debater, as unable to be concise as he is presents the facts, figures and other details which he hopes will provide the evidence to support his claims in anything less than pure technocracy. Which for me, is one of the most interesting things about him, his talent for removing any emotion from anything he says.

His career prior to becoming an MP would, one might have thought, have developed and then refined his debating skills to a higher level than he has thus far exhibited. That even as late on in the day and especially after his lacklustre performance during the first TV debate, his advisors would’ve coached him, or at the very least, tried to prepare him as best they could. But seemingly not. What he should have left viewers with was a sense that this was man who had a bright and golden vision for Britain, that under his and Labours leadership was a better future to be had for everyone. Instead of which however, he seemed to be offering a marginally less grim one than the one we have now.

Prada made repeated claims about cutting taxes, of how Labour couldn’t be trusted on tax, whilst ignoring the fire that was raging in his trousers. Its not that on his watch, there have been 25 rises on various taxes since 2019, which has created the largest tax burden on working people in 70 years or his exploiting of peoples own naked self-interest that bothers me, as much as his short term perspective does. I made this point before, that because the UK has an ageing population in order to meet the challenges upon the state that situation invariably brings, one of two things needs to happen. 

Either taxation will have to increase to match the funding our public services will need to cope with those demands, or drastic changes will need to be made to both the range of services the state provides and with that, strict enforcement of new rules surrounding what the eligibility for those services is.

But the brutal reality was not something either Plonker or Prada wanted to address. Plonker once again made his claim that he would create an extra 40,000 NHS appointments week to solve the waiting list crisis. As I pointed out with regard to his plans for 80 new courts to deal with rape cases, where is the capacity in the system to make his words anything more than that?  

For one thing, where are the staff going to come from, given that the NHS has over 100,000 vacancies?  And if that number could be magically reduced, this creates two new problems. Are those vacancies going to be filled by foreign workers – until such time as we have enough British born staff qualified to fill them – in which case we’re solving our problem by creating one elsewhere, and also where is the money going to come from to pay these mythical staff? 

Prada banged on continuously about the so called’ triple lock plus’ for pensioners, like it was a good thing. How can promising to increase the state pension – which last year totalled over £110 billions, or 42% of the welfare budget – be seen as anything other than astoundingly financially irresponsible? To effectively prioritise the needs of the one demographic that is known to consistently vote, for his own short term political gain. The ‘Triple lock plus’ is more like ‘triple threat guarantee’, as not only are they living longer, there are also an increasing number of them living longer and the cost to the state will only increase.

Now I’ve got that off my chest, I have to reluctantly admit that Prada was by far the better debater. A lot of what he said I either disagreed with or else were easily provable lies, but it was the way that he constantly hammered home the same points, avoided waffle and was occasionally tenaciously focused that impressed me. The way he carried on, you’d think Plonker was the one with a 14 year record to defend and that he was channelling his inner Goebells!

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Why this whole betting nonsense still continues to considered newsworthy is beyond me. So people betted on the outcome of a thing and suddenly the media profess to be aghast that such a thing has happened, that somehow this thing, being as how it is so egregious, is indicative of the lack of integrity of our politics.

Obviously not within the Labour Party. As the all-but elected next government, the media aren’t going to upset them too much, but misdeeds by Conservative MP’s? That’s a narrative that needs no selling, given as how their various scandals have kept both the tabloid and broadsheet reading public shocked, appalled and amused for decades

In an article published on the BBC’s website yesterday, their political correspondent attempted to explain why it mattered so much by the novel means of suggesting that basically there was not much of a story anyway.

‘In plenty of the alleged cases, we don’t know if there was indeed a bet, how much was bet, how many bets there were, precisely what was bet on, what the odds were, what the winnings were or, crucially, what the person placing the bet did or didn’t know about when the election would be.

Journalism can be long-winded and imperfect. We reporters rarely know as much as we would like to know, and we never stop asking questions.’

Except that there are some questions that they never stop asking because they never started asking them in the first place. Where has there been any discussion of the national debt? The implications for it of yet more borrowing, if Plonker has his way. A debt that stands at over £2,690 billions. Prada witters on about tax cuts, but no-one challenges him on how these can be afforded when the interest on the debt is £120 millions a day, or £1,388 a second.

Compared to those astronomical sums, the betting nonsense isn’t so much a storm in a teacup as not even the briefest of warm breezes across its surface.