While austerity rages on, the town's already disillusioned voters are being offered merely sordid spectacle
Roll up for the grand finale of another great byelection carnival on Thursday. Nothing delights the denizens of Westminster so much as the death or disgrace of an MP, as the finger of fate falls on another constituency of unsuspecting voters. The political charivari packs its bags and heads off for some faraway place of which we know little, but a quick Wiki check, a google of cuttings and a stroll down the high street soon makes local sociologists of us all. Ah, a Poundland, a Betfred, a bingo hall and a pawn shop! Charity shops aplenty, a Peacocks but no M&S, neat and well-kempt, house prices rising, low unemployment, squeezed strivers – not rich, not poor. Voila!
This time Eastleigh has been graced with a particularly unedifying spectacle of the Westminster charade, confirming the worst of what many detest about politics. Vote-grubbing schmoozers chase people into shops, after just one thing. Big names frighten them on their doorsteps, oozing bogus bonhomie. What do think, how do you feel, who do you hate most? The vox pop – that spurious journalistic conceit – lets reporters seek out quotes to confirm each one's opinions (or for the BBC, just a meaningless one of each). Predictions? Only the foolhardy would guess. Does it matter which of government parties inches past the other? Both Nick Clegg and David Cameron are imperiled by failure here, but a Tory loss will send that party into paroxysms of fear that 2015 is lost already.
You want vox pops? I have collected plenty in my wanderings around the place: "Bugger me if they're not all the bloody same!" comes in quite handy. But I could equally well give you: "The Lib Dems have done a lot for us." Or, if you prefer: "David Cameron deserves credit for cleaning up Labour's debts." Or this: "Who's guarding our borders? Not the EU. We should get out and send them all home." And sometimes, "Labour, always Labour." Pollsters and bookies are not entirely reliable in hard-to-call byelections but they are a hell of a lot better than hacks trying to glean wisdom from the street. Any honest reporter will record the sheer weight of indifference, ignorance and cynicism that sends you away downcast by the distance between the disengaged and our little world of political obsessives.
Their distrust may be justified here, as this byelection follows a familiarly vicious pattern, the air thick with dirty tricks. Where did the Lord Rennard sleaze reprise from 2009 suddenly come from, and why now in the final runup to election day? Blasted across every front page, Nick Clegg's fumbling response hasn't helped, but it doesn't take an expert political nose to suspect this stinks. If the accusations are true, Lord Rennard's gropings will be all too familiar to women everywhere, harried by grimy colleagues fondling, pinching, leering, and pretending women can't take a joke if they complain. It's nasty and sometimes career-threatening. Remember that the Lib Dems voted through new rules that make it harder and more expensive for women to take unfair dismissal and harassment at work cases to tribunals.
But (so far) the Rennard allegations look less than criminal: a grubby pawing of women candidates on a training session is revolting and all too horribly common. Yet this squalid little "not safe in taxis" tale is being bracketed with the serial rape of children in homes and hospitals by Jimmy Savile. It comes packaged with charges that gay-bashing Cardinal O'Brien touched young priests whose future depended entirely on him. Or it's blended into Cyril Smith's grotesque abuse of boys in care. Melding all abuse into one syndrome trivialises the truly horrific in order to nail the merely repellent but everyday groping of adults.
As that faulty elision is obvious to most people, the attack switches to the Lib Dems' failure to investigate. However, Danny Alexander's stern word seems to have caused Rennard's resignation "on health grounds". A less than mortal crime (as revealed so far) was handled too quietly, but their most senior party strategist was ejected. Clegg's error was to try to finesse what he knew, using what the Mail splashes as "weasel words". Nonetheless, keep it in proportion.
Who knows what effect this dirty washing will have? Some Tory tricks directed at Ukip backfired. News of Ukip MEP Marta Andreason's defection to the Conservative's sent a nifty byelection Exocet into the Farage camp, but that only underlined the vanishing border between the two parties. Maria Hutchings, the Tory candidate, wants out of the EU and no gay marriage. Though a Cameron A-lister floated into the seat for 2010, she loose-cannoned into the news with her contempt for local schools and her flight from debates, with her team hiding her whereabouts. Instead, the slick and professional candidate on the right is Ukip's Diane James, whose manifesto would cheer most Tory MPs. As Cameron campaigns on immigration, the parties have little left to fight over.
Labour does the best it can in a no-hope seat, 258th on its winnable list. Fielding the thoroughly decent John O'Farrell showed eagerness to put their case well, and he does. The writer sails amiably above the byelection dirt, promoting the value of politics to the disaffected: he praises Chris Huhne's local work, "a big figure", "most politicians are good people", and implores people to "vote for someone, even if not for me".
Naturally he says that choosing either coalition party is a vote for the chancellor's growth-destroying austerity. Naturally he reminds them of the tax cut for millionaires in this squeezed middle territory. But Labour is squeezed here after two decades of local Lib Dem pavement politics. So is the NHS Action party on its first outing by a decent doctor with the best of causes. First-past-the-post cruelly crushes democratic upstarts, but since the people in their wisdom rejected a second preference option, voters must scuttle for their least worst of the frontrunners.
The Tories have been paid back by Moody's ill-timed trick. Downgrading the UK's AAA credit rating rips away George Osborne's last fig leaf. Despite an economy worse than flatlining, plunging sterling and a collapsed housebuilding sector, the chancellor will "redouble" the austerity that poisons any hope of growth. That's what this byelection should be about, not about gropings or smears. But if the race really is between two parties bent on the economics of the garotte, the result may say little about the nation's true political state of mind.