Disenfranchisement

The Telegraph's eclectic host of commentators have greeted the start of the election campaign with surprisingly uniform, weary contempt. Simon Heffer today perhaps expresses the consensus best:   

No one from the main parties will tell the truth about the need to sack hundreds of thousands of people on the public payroll in order to ensure we live within our means. Nobody will tell the truth about how lower taxes increase revenue, because there are too many cheap votes in bashing bankers who earn lots of money. Nobody will properly defend capitalism as an essential ingredient of a free society. Nobody will champion selective education, which gives such a chance in life to bright children from poor homes, and nobody will be truthful about the pointlessness of much university education.

Nobody will dare to be radical about the corrupt effects of the welfare state. Nobody will take the radical approach needed to counter the results of unlimited immigration. Above all – and that last point leads on to this – nobody will confront the public with the realities of our membership of a European Union governed by the Treaty of Lisbon, which has left us with a choice of staying in on Europe's terms, or getting out.