Paul Speller’s Election Diary
September 10-16 (One week until the Election!)
Volume will not hide vacuity
One week to go!
You can tell, because the number of manifestos dropping onto the doormat has increased substantially.
As has the weight.
At Ballaspeller we have now received three different manifestos (from three different candidates) that amount to 20 pages.
I cannot decide whether this is supreme optimism, hoping that voters will read 20 pages – front and back! – or actually a clever ruse, getting everything in one document with just days to go until polling.
Ultimately, I guess the worth of the tactic will be proven or otherwise when the results come in. Although, given at least three candidates have adopted the 20-page formula in my constituency, it’s not going to work for all of them, with only two seats up for grabs.
Volume will not hide vacuity.
If there’s no substance or no sense, then it doesn’t matter how many pages there are, the voters will be looking to recycle. (Candidate or manifesto.)
Out and about on the election trail
The past week has seen a lot of time once more spent on the election trail.
This has included more stalking of constituents to obtain their views; sharing a bench with a famous cat while talking to a former chief minister; and having a chat with the head of the mission observing the electoral process here and then feeling smug when he was impressed that I asked him about the switch from parish to all-island voting in his home state of Guernsey.
(For what it’s worth, the answer was a tactful one, to the effect that there are pros and cons with both.)
There was also a visit to a primary school to obtain the thoughts of 10 and 11-year-olds about the election.
I think, although I cannot say with certainty, that my initially sceptical colleague was won over by the fact that some of the things the youngsters came up with made more sense than some of the things the grown-ups and the candidates had thought of.*
It was certainly an easier task than criss-crossing the island to obtain voters’ opinions about the election.
Even though we managed to speak to people from every single constituency, we’ve had comments from some who seemed genuinely surprised that constituents were allowed to travel from one area of the island to another and still have an opinion about their own constituency.
We have reassured them we are not living under some authoritarian regime where everyone must know their place and stay there.
Not yet, anyway.
(*Yes, the differentiation between grown-ups and candidates was deliberate.)
A rollercoaster final week?
So what can we expect for the final week before polling?
You can guarantee plenty of nonsense on social media. Hopefully less nonsense of the kind that happened in Ayre and Michael.
You can guarantee some late policy announcements.
As the week goes on and the enormity of Thursday becomes clear, you can guarantee that, if you listen closely to some of the candidates, you will hear the hope fade from their voices.
And you can also guarantee that we won’t be able to predict every single result.
But we might try to pretend we did.
Let’s hope for a rollercoaster ride to the polling booth.
You can read Paul’s Election Diary entry for last week here: