The great bee-smuggling scandal

The principal concerns of the electors vary rather more widely than the pollsters and pundits would suggest. One man in Guisborough – probably middle-aged, short of teeth, a little unkempt – suggested to me that the government needed to clamp down on foreigners importing bees into the country. This was being done covertly, he said. He himself had noticed a huge increase in the number of bees of late and – as a consequence of something he had read online – believed that this was clear evidence of smuggling. Why, I asked him, would people smuggle bees into the country? ‘That is exactly what I would like the authorities to find out,’ he replied.

Otherwise the chief complaints were the cost of living, potholes, idle skanky people, antisocial behaviour, immigration (sans bees) and, of course, Tory incompetence. In six weeks of campaigning, however, only one elector mentioned to me the parlous state of the National Health Service and how we needed to ‘save’ it. Nor was the issue raised at the only hustings in my constituency. It was, then, entirely absent from the general list of concerns – and this in an area which suffers worse than most from ill-health.

I do wonder how issues become propelled to the top of the nation’s agenda – I suspect a kind of fix. When hectored by polling companies about the NHS, I think people feel compelled to say ‘Yes, I think that is very important’, partly because they have been schooled to repeat that mantra and partly because they believe, vaguely, that hospitals are an agreeable concept.

News programmes always put the NHS at the top of the list of stuff which needs doing and, in fairness, it is invariably the most discussed issue on the BBC’s Question Time.