Daily View: Predictions for the election campaign
Commentators make their predictions for what they expect to see during the election campaign period.
this election will see more coded messages:
"When the politicians want to get something across but have not got the courage to say what they mean, they will resort to the coded message. Standing outside No 10 yesterday, Gordon Brown deployed several, including 'I am an ordinary man from an ordinary background' (meaning: David Cameron is a privileged toff), and 'I am not a team of one, I am one of a team' (meaning: I am too unpopular to do this on my own)."
few Labour activists believe they can win the general election, instead seeking to deny the Tories:
"As for hopes, they pray that the voters are at last seeing 6 May as a choice between competing options, not a referendum on Labour's past performance. Once it's a straight choice, they believe that even those who are hardly enamoured of the government will balk at the prospect of Prime Minister Cameron. They hope that the Tories will maintain the pattern of behaviour established since January: zig-zagging on policy, unravelling under pressure. They want the verdict on the TV debates to declare Cameron likable, but a lightweight - while they hope Brown performs the way he did before the Chilcot inquiry: immersed in detail and solid as granite."
the main parties may avoid the subject of immigration:
"[O]ne understands why neither of the main parties really wants to talk about immigration not least because the public doesn't want to hear much of this even if the Tories and Labour were minded to tell them the truth which, of course, they are not.
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"A balanced approach might require a combination of breeding, bumping off grannie and opening borders. Good luck selling that! Things are going to have to change and for the sake of our parents and ourselves we should probably, whether we like it or not, get used to living on a more crowded island."
The that the electorate will be "deceived and ignored" about spending cuts:
"For fear of frightening us, nobody dares spell out the truth - and still less does any party offer us a coherent political philosophy, Right or Left. Safer to fob us off with infantile election posters and heart-warming photographs of their families."
that judging from the audience of his shows he expects disillusionment, disenchantment and apathy among voters during this election:
"It's interesting the questions you get. The first question we got was 'if we're going to have a hung parliament, who should we start with?'"
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to his to fellow political journalists about what to avoid in the campaign:
"Comment (of which this is a part) is replacing news. Brown goes to someone's home in the pretence of visiting a 'real' family. So the media expose the artifice.
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"Our excuse - a good one - is that there is nothing real to report. The parties have engineered their campaigns to look good on the media. In return the media is refusing to play ball.
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"All this risks developing into an absurd feedback loop: stunts all round. The white noise will drown out reality."
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