'Yesterday Once More' as parties sing same ol' tune

Political posturing does not alter the fact that a change of government will not change a thing

IT’S PROBABLY my age, but the lyrics of Karen Carpenter’s Yesterday Once More keep floating into my mind. It has the immortal chorus, “Every Sha-la-la-la/Every Wo-wo-wo/Still shines./Every shing-a-ling-a-ling/That they’re starting to sing’s/So fine.”

One of the verses is about how memories coming back to her can even make her cry, and ends with, “it’s yesterday once more”.

It may as well be yesterday, once more, when it comes to this election. It is being conducted with an air of resolute denial of reality, which is exactly like the last election. Have we learnt nothing?

Before the last election, Fianna Fáil and the other major parties vied with each other in measures that would inflate the property bubble still more. This election, the two parties most likely to be in government together, Fine Gael and Labour, are downplaying the significance of the EU-IMF bailout instead of acknowledging it as an utterly confining straitjacket that presents a grim, ironclad boundary to any aspirations.

Renegotiate the deal? I may as well promise to bring Brazil and Spain to play in Croke Park next Sunday. What exactly have the potential coalition partners to offer to bring the other negotiators back to the table? Where, exactly, is their position of strength? The only chance of success would lie in being willing to exercise the nuclear option of default, which neither Fine Gael nor Labour support.

It is possible that there might be some leeway on the interest rates, which might make a difference of half a billion or so. Not to be sniffed at. Lots of people would be grateful for any amount of money that is cut off our eventual bill.

But faced with the billions we owe, and the fact that we are locked out of the markets, the potential saving pales into insignificance. We are merely at the start of a very painful few years and, no matter who is elected, that reality will not change significantly.

It’s round about now that I’ll be accused (again) of being a closet Fianna Fáil-er. Sadly, one does not have to have any love for Fianna Fáil, closet or otherwise, to recognise that the mess that they bequeathed us will not just be wished away.

And by the way, they did have a mandate when they were merrily fuelling the property bubble. Funny, isn’t it, how many people declare themselves furious with them, but how few people admit that they voted for the policies that they now claim to despise?

Sadly, the disgust people feel for Fianna Fáil will transfer itself seamlessly and very quickly to whatever parties next hold power.

Those with a few quid left could place a bet on the satisfaction ratings of the new government in December 2011.

The trouble is, you wouldn’t make much money, because public dissatisfaction is so predictable.

It doesn’t help that so much of what is being discussed amounts to sha-la-la-la and shing-a-ling-a-ling. Take just one area, that of health policy.

The most likely combination in government next time is a Fine Gael-Labour coalition. Fine Gael wants a privately funded health insurance system, with some government subsidy. They want to replicate a system found in the Netherlands, where they pay hefty taxes for it, just without paying the hefty taxes. Labour wants a publicly funded system.

Let’s suppose Fine Gael and Labour try to find a compromise. Oh dear, that would be what we have right now, wouldn’t it?

Mind you, the real wo-wo-wo is to be found in Sinn Féin’s economic policies, yet they are hovering around 12 per cent in the opinion polls. Ah, the polls. The various polls, they tell us, cannot even be compared to each other because they use different methodologies, yet they are constantly treated as some kind of empirical reality.

People lie to pollsters. Get over it. It has been known since the 1960s. One woman, Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann even made a career out of it, when puzzling disparities in the results of polls and the actual election results made her curious.

In the German election of 1965, she discovered that people were reluctant to admit even to a pollster, that they were voting for the Christian Democrats, because the Social Democrats were apparently in the ascendance. This reluctance skewed the poll results.

In 1972, she and others tested a hypothesis. If you asked a question framed something like “aside from your own opinion, who do you think will win the next election?” would the opinion polls be more accurate? The answer was yes.

In other words, when they were merely being asked to speculate on the potential voting patterns of others, people were much more honest than when being asked who they would vote for themselves. Yet opinion polls based on declared voter preferences are still dissected as if they were some kind of infallible truth.

Before the last election, Fine Gael and Labour had some kind of reasonably coherent common strategy. That cannot be said of this election. So not only do we not have realistic policies, but we don’t even know what mishmash will eventually emerge as a programme for government.

On taxes, Labour wants a 50/50 split between cuts and extra taxes, while Fine Gael favours cuts far more than taxes. Fine Gael reckons we can dispense with 30,000 public servants, while Labour thinks it can come up with 18,000 voluntary redundancies. Health Service Executive, anyone?

The reality is that six people, possibly Michael Noonan, Richard Bruton, Leo Varadkar, Joan Burton, Pat Rabbitte and Brendan Howlin, will negotiate a programme for government behind closed doors. The electorate will have to settle for “Trust us. We’re not Fianna Fáil”.

It may be naive in the extreme to expect political parties to be totally honest about the difficulties ahead. But there is something that all the parties could do as a sign of good faith. They could publish audited accounts of their finances before the election, with a clear indicator of what sources of finance they are willing to forgo in the future in order to end the era of political cronyism.

It might be some reassurance that there really is change ahead, and not just political posturing. Sadly, for some time ahead, it will be “yesterday, once more” but let’s drop the sha-la-la-la and shing-a-ling-a-ling.