With one week to go before Parliament is dissolved and Election 2015 officially begins, the three “major” parties can’t seem to get out of their own way…with the minor parties bizarrely following suit. It makes one wonder if Alex Massie (Spectator, UK) had a point about no one wanting to win the election.
We’ll start with the opposition: Labour, whose leader – Ed Milliband – just got slammed by…his own MP (City AM):
Simon Danczuk, the Labour MP for Rochdale, said Miliband was a liability and failed to connect with voters – many of which thought him a “f*****g knob.”
The Labour leader, he said, was more of a toff than Cameron, while the party had been hijacked by the liberal north London elite.
So perhaps Labour voters put off by Danczuk (or Milliband, for that matter) might look to the Liberal Democrats – except that in addition to suffering from being in the coalition government with the Tories, the Lib Dems also have a fundraising scandal to drag them down (Huffington Post UK). A different money problem has just felled the United Kingdom Independence Party (Reuters). It’s enough to make an anti-government voter go running to the Greens…well, if you’re ready to vote for a party whose candidates make fun of cancer survivors (Guido Fawkes).
The only opposition party that’s managed to avoid jumping on a landmine isn’t even an available option outside of Scotland…although the SNP’s biggest mouth (Alex Salmond) has made it clear he expects to call the tune in any minority Labour government (BBC). To give an idea of the SNP’s hammerlock in Scotland, this isn’t being seen as a gaffe, but rather a clever move by “Eck” to shore up the Conservative vote in England and keep the Scottish left firmly in the ‘Nats corner (Telegraph, UK)…
…which bring us at last to the Tories, for whom the electorate veers back and forth: grudgingly crediting them with steering the British economy back into growth one day, and deciding it still hates them anyway the next. So of course, the party’s greatest asset (PM David Cameron) decides to announce that if his party is elected, Britain will definitely have someone else as PM by 2020 (Massie, author of the theory that no one really wants to win this election).
Whatever Massie may think – and despite the best efforts of the parties themselves – someone has to be Prime Minister after the 7th of May.
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