If voting changed anything…

…they’d make it illegal!

Emma Goldman

One of the interesting consequences of being married to a girl from the other side of the planet – a side of the planet to which I myself intend re-locating – is the discovery that when it comes to politics there is simultaneously little to choose between nations whilst at the same time being a world of difference. I guess that – whereas the ‘art’ and practice of politics are pretty much universal – the intricacies of the situation at any particular point on the globe tend to render the actuality of the local political jungle opaque to the outsider.

The Kickass Canada Girl has explained Canadian federal and provincial politics to me on a number of occasions. Sadly she finds herself having to repeat things that have clearly not penetrated deep enough to have stuck, though I do believe that I am making slow progress. It doesn’t help that there would seem to be an appreciable disconnect between the politics of British Columbia and those of the rest of the nation. This should come as no surprise given the size of the country, I suppose, particularly since in the UK – a comparatively compact constituency – we seem able to support an infeasibly extended accretion of political opinion – albeit not across our major parties.

Perhaps one of the best ways of getting a flavour of the political purlieu in any particular locale is to follow the work of the political cartoonists thereabouts. In the UK this noble and ancient art can be traced to the 19th century and to such luminaries as Hogarth and Gillray. The latter’s renowned cartoon – ‘The Plum Pudding in Danger’ – representing Napoleon and Pitt dividing the globe into ‘spheres of influence’ – is a particularly good example of the genre.

All this – of course – simply by way of an introduction to a cartoon that I saw in this week’s Observer, and that I thought might give quite a good flavour of current UK politics to any of you across the pond who don’t follow such things. And, well – why would you?

The cartoon refers to the recent Eastleigh by-election – brought on by the resignation of the sitting Liberal Democrat MP on pleading guilty to an offence (his wife took the rap for a speeding ticket when he was – in fact – the driver!). To make life harder for themselves the Lib Dems fought the campaign in the shadow of the fallout of a recent sex scandal (oh – really!) centring on the alleged behaviour of their former chief executive.

The Lib Dems are currently in coalition with the Tories who – though they themselves had designs on winning the seat from their coalition partners (nice!) – found themselves beaten into third place by the UK Independence Party, whose political leanings probably don’t need much introduction.

Chris Riddell’s cartoon captures the essential zeitgeist pretty well, I think. I particularly like the Lib Dems as a diminutive unicorn!