Claire Wright’s public meetings are open to everyone. She has been visiting people in the constituency for months, she IS out on our streets pretty much every day, true public meetings are frequent, questions are not chosen, no charge is made, though individual donations are welcome. Compare with the following:
“Each of the “public meetings” I have attended have required people’s names to be on a list to get in. I saw a woman showing her passport to those running the door at Tony Blair’s event in Sedgefield.
In Dudley, Ukip were charging their pre-screened audience £5 a ticket, for the privilege of submitting any questions they may wish to ask to a moderator, who selected the ones he liked and declined them even the opportunity of being allowed to read them out themselves.
On a vast deserted building site in Watford, sanitised even of construction workers, we looked at Clegg looking at some architect’s drawings. Then we drove to Cardiff and waited outside a factory test kitchen while he made a pancake. …
… But surely the ultimate positive example of politicians going walkabout somewhere real is last year’s Scottish referendum. I didn’t cover that, but those who did, and friends who were there, tell me the leaders and big beasts were out on the streets and available for interaction. Can it be a coincidence that the campaign invigorated politics in a way many had imagined impossible?
Yet it feels a million miles away from the current electoral offering. At many Tory events, specially selected activists are made to stand behind Boris or Cameron or whoever is speaking, holding aloft campaign slogans. In the still pictures which make the news, it looks as though the politician’s speech is rousing a crowd of supporters to wave placards with riotous approval. In real life, this dynamism is a sham. The supporters are static, posed in bizarre tableaux vivants, their arms presumably getting more and more tired.
The effect of this, and indeed of all the parties’ stagey micromanagement, is to do a terrible disservice to the spectators, who are, after all, the voters. Placed in these ultra-managed situations they cease to really be people. They become people-effect wallpaper. Meanwhile, politicians withdraw from civic spaces in favour of their own kitchens. Unless this way of doing business is radically altered, we are reaching a stage where it would be less embarrassing or absurd to green-screen elections.”
East Devon Watch 