I can’t believe there are less than 48 hours until polling day. What will I do afterwards? Currently, every waking moment is spent glued to 24 hour news channels (particularly fun for playing a game I’ve developed called spot the ratio of cameos by leaders’ wives vs cameos by female politicians), or Radio 4.
It doesn’t need to stop with MSM. There’s also the fantastic Straight Choice, where you can have a look at election leaflets from almost any party in almost any constituency in the UK. They’ve even got a map of how many leaflets they have in different constituencies (online maps have to be one of my favourite parts of election2010).
Anyway, the Guardian election live blog today included an interesting tidbit from Martin Wainwright about the Straight Choice. I’ve highlighted the relevant bits:
I’m at a press conference in Liverpool where the Straight Choice – political activists who want fair and truthful elections – are publishing a study of 4,000 leaflets delivered in the election so far. Their findings show massive misuse of statistics to convince voters that support for one or other of the parties would be a wasted vote, and also the level of “centralised leaflets” which save parties money – because local candidates simply upload or mail-merge a bit of personal stuff on to a shared template – but also set the tone of the campaigns. Thus Labour leaflets almost all emphasise the word “Labour” and hide the word “Brown” while Tory ones do the opposite with Conservative and Cameron. The report also shows astonishing neglect of safe seats; Liverpool Walton with its 15,000 Labour majority has had just one leaflet so far while marginal Liverpool Wavertree has had 51.
I’m quite pleased about this because it correlates with a story I worked on (with a reporter) when I was doing an internship at the FT, where we found a serious lack of mentions of Gordon Brown in Labour leaflets.
Which is great, but I suppose it doesn’t help in understanding what I’m going to do with my time once this is over. Any suggestions? Will there be a post-election hotline for people with withdrawal symptoms?
Dina Rickman
