All of the ephemera that is far too trivial to be bothered with elsewhere on this site or, depending on your point of view, a meta-commentary on it. This ephemera includes, but is not limited to art, music and literature. Most of the content here will be discussed in terms that are as abstract as possible, reality being a singularly overrated concept.
"We are looking at voters as consumers; they are the same people who buy sofas or cans of fizzy drink... The Tories' switch to the sort of advertising employed by high street retailers and consumer brands breaks with party political advertising tradition."
The parallel is presumably an exact one, given that most cans of fizzy drinks are every bit as homogenous and indistinguishable as political parties. Cynicism aside, the replacement of the idea of the citizen with the idea of the consumer seems imprecise to me; particulary given that much of Tory policy has encouraged that idea on the one hand (in particular the concept of applying consumer choice to the provision of public services, for example hospital league tables, school vouchers) and demanded notions of citizenship on the other (the defence of tradition, promulgation of family values and so on). The problem is that while it isn't necessarily true that the role of consumer and citizen are opposed, nor is it true that they are necessarily identical. There is a difference between a market state and a nation state and it might be as well for all concerned to make a choice between two not especially compatible models.
