Election campaigns or a slanging match?

Photo: Amortize. Available from https://www.flickr.com/photos/amortize/10684275/in/photostream/

As we are all aware (and if you're not, you seriously need to get out) there is a General Election on the horizon.

It that time when the politicians will literally climb over each other to get your votes, doing all they can to woo you and prove that they are worthy of that little cross next to their name on your ballot paper.

It is also a time when all forms of media are completely swamped with campaigns.
You turn on the TV and there's a party political broadcast. You turn on the radio and Nick Clegg is sprouting more promises that will probably be broken within the week. You go on to Facebook and there's people sharing UKIP posters.

It really is unavoidable, and the best thing to do, if you don't want to go mental, is to just embrace it.

I've got a serious problem with political campaigns though, and I find myself getting seriously frustrated every time I see one.

It seems as if it's virtually impossible to be successful in creating a political campaign unless you spend all your time and money slating the other politicians, rather than setting out what YOU are going to do.

Labour's party political broadcast in 2014 for the EU elections was a spoof of a cabinet meeting for the Conservative-Liberal Democrat government, mainly focussing on Nick Clegg and cleverly titled The Un-credible Shrinking Man.


The spoof draws in on the decisions made by the Tory government and Clegg's reluctance to stop them and being swayed easily by what the Tories told him.

The somewhat comical sketch acts as a prime example of where the major political parties try to poke holes at the other parties, rather than show off what they want to do.

The exact same thing happens every week at Prime Minister's Questions, where Cameron and Miliband just fire shots at each other, rather than tackling actual problems that really need looking at.

Surely it would be better for everyone if the parties just focus on their own policies and spend their efforts proving to the public that they're worth voting for?

Instead, the unfortunate reality is that they're all as bad as each other and it seems they are all too immature to focus on themselves and instead need to point out everyone else's flaws.

We're one of the only countries that still does this.


It's kind of embarrassing, really. 

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