Even political anoraks like me are dreading yet ANOTHER trip to the ballot box

John MacLeod

IAM a lifelong political anorak. I can bore for Britain on swing, percentages, marginals, Worcester Woman and the Single Transferable Vote.

Other boys sought a season ticket for Hearts. I got Robert Waller’s The Almanac of British Politics 1983 and loved it.

I can still reel off, from memory, all the candidates in the 1982 Glasgow Hillhead by-election. I have, in my own party allegiance, folded leaflets, stuffed envelopes, chapped doors and scaled lampposts.

I can remind you who was Walter Mondale’s running mate; I have the entire STV report of the incoming 2015 election results on my Sky + box and love the drama of a live election count, such as the East Lothian night in May 2011 when it came down to moonlighting bank tellers racking up a few tens of votes as Iain Gray’s face turned the shade of badly curdled béchamel. His majority, in the event, was 151 on a 62.3 per cent turnout.

To me, of yore, a national election – especially a general election – has been the joyous binge-watching equivalent of the World Cup.

On one glorious occasion – the Braidburn and Fairmilehead Lothian Regional Council by-election in October 1987 (Con. hold) – I personally furnished the 10p coin with which, in hot wax, a battered ballot box was sealed.

So why, when news broke on Tuesday morning that Mrs May was going to the country, was my uncharacteristic reaction a hollow groan?

Because I am ballot-weary. Polled to death. All voted out. More than exhausted of what, it seems, are excessive dues to democracy.

By the morning of Friday, June 9, we in Scotland will have been summoned to do the thing with the stubby Sellotaped pencil seven times in less than three years – the 2014 European Parliament elections; the independence referendum; the 2015 general election; last year’s Scottish parliament hustings; the EU plebiscite; the upcoming local elections and, now, imminent opportunity to put Jeremy Corbyn out of our misery.

We have to look back through primaeval mists to 2013 as the last serene year when we were not bidden to report to some dusty hall reeking of hymn books and Scouts – and, beyond that, 2008 as the previous twelvemonth when we were excused turning out to back the bad against the worse or smug incumbent over some yapping wannabe.

Now, yet again, we are called on to parade in the exercise of universal adult suffrage.

I know I should be thankful. I am most aware of the moral obligation to brave reformers who fought for these rights.

I most vividly recall, in 1979, my venerable grandmother insisting on being conveyed to the village school on a stormlashed day as it rained in rods, in order to cast her vote – because, until she was well into adulthood, as a mere woman she had not been allowed to.

Unexpected

Yet, on Tuesday, I was all with Brenda from Bristol, whose vivid telecast horror went, as they say, viral, on the news of our unexpected if unlikely chance to end May in June: ‘You’re joking! Not another one… Honestly, I can’t stand it. There’s too much politics going on at the moment – why does she need to do it?’

Whatever your party allegiance, that is a perfectly fair point. Not two years have passed since the last general election. It produced a Conservative government with a working majority – more than it might seem on paper, given the continued huffy refusal of Sinn Féin MPs to take their seats and the general Rightwingery of Nigel Dodds and his seven DUP colleagues.

This is an unnecessary dissolution of Parliament, occasioned not by the interests of the country but, in truth, the internal indiscipline of the Conservative Party and the Guardian-fanning irresponsibility of rather a lot of members of the House of Lords.

The language, too, made one wince. Not even the Cabinet – far less the Prime Minister – has the authority to ‘call’ a general election. Dissolution of Parliament is in the Royal prerogative and the Queen – whom Mrs May, on Tuesday, did not even bother to meet, but casually intimated her wheeze by telephone – could, quite correctly and constitutionally, have declined to grant one in the circumstances.

It is annoying, too, when a politician stands before the microphone with pious platitudes and gives a packaged list of reasons save for what we all know is the real one. ‘Actually, I’m going back on my word and forcing a general election because Labour is led by an unelectable muppet, the weekend papers gave my party a thumping poll lead and I really want Nicky Morgan and Anna Soubry out of my hair…’

Now is not the time, to coin a phrase, and it was all the more depressing after the Prime Minister’s unctuous furthermore-I-say-unto-you Easter meditation. But there are sharper irritations.

A general election is very expensive; about £90million of our money. It is also inconvenient and vexing. I have holiday plans for early June. I must now either amend them or organise a postal vote, in honour of democracy.

Meanwhile, broadcast news will be simply unbearable for the next eight weeks. David Torrance and John Curtice will never be off the box and assorted satirical news programmes will have to large degree zip it for the duration.

There will be polls, and polls of polls, and ceaseless analysis of polls of polls. Postie will soon daily be stuffing my mailbox with much daily cat litter and Nicola Sturgeon will turn up at every other hideous Brutalist 1970s civic centre gurning for selfies.

There is also, these days, an uncomfortable existentialism in Scottish politics. It’s not really, now, about deciding which set of suits is best, in your judgment, to run our affairs. It is ‘What think ye of the Union?’

I deplore those who talk of the Ulsterisation of Scottish politics. We are nowhere near the toxic sterility of public life in the Six Counties, where your vote (for the most part) is determined by tribal and religious and cultural identification.

But there is something unnerving about our building era of flag politics, and it will be especially trying on this occasion because it will be a battle of three different nationalisms: a harrumphing pro-Brexit post-Brexit Britishness; whiney Bremoaning virtue signalling by the sort of folk who want to knit their own yogurt; and brittle SNP platitudes that blame every last woe on the Union.

Commitment

And it is likely to end in unnerving gridlock. Theresa May might well include, in her manifesto, a Tory commitment that there will on no account be a Scottish independence poll save over her cold dead body.

Nicola Sturgeon is no less likely to seek a direct and unambiguous mandate to proceed with one. It seems probable that both will – in their respective electoral realms – win an overall majority and where will that leave us?

The one mercy is that, on this occasion and for the first time after decades of policy convergence and Oxbridgeeducated leaders in identikit suits, we will on June 8 have a meaningful choice.

If you still and always love the EU, you have Tim Farron and the Liberal Democrats; Corbyn and his glory-to-theworkers-of-the-polenta-collective farce offer us unambiguous return to policies long set aside by Red China; Mrs May will take us back to sound money, robust foreign policy and 1955… and our Nicola proffers yet another jolly outing to the polling place.

Oh, the joy.