IT BEGAN amid inanity and racism.  And it ends amid apathy — and racism.

It began with Rishi Sunak mislaying his umbrella for the big announcement and Keir Starmer trying to end the parliamentary career of one black woman, Diane Abbott, while trying to stop that of another, Faiza Shaheen, from even starting.

It ends with a disengaged electorate disliking the options before it — and with Keir Starmer urging more deportations of Bangladeshis alongside the dominant personality appearing to be Nigel Farage, who sets the agenda without having done a day’s shift as an MP.

The disengagement may be the most significant feature of the campaign. Criss-crossing the country, and sitting in cafes and pubs, almost no-one is talking about the poll on July 4.

In 2017 this reporter’s neighbourhood was festooned with placards and posters, mainly for Labour with a few Conservative. Now there is not a trace.

You don’t need Tory-style insider information to bet on a low turnout. Polls show contempt for the outgoing government, but no enthusiasm for the supposed incoming one. Both prime ministerial candidates’ polling is subterranean on virtually every human quality imaginable.

The crisis in society has been ducked. Both parties have more-or-less identical policies on the economy, the budget and funding public services, so why trouble to discuss it? 

Perhaps the most important intervention of the campaign was from the Institute for Fiscal Studies, which said Labour and the Tories are both avoiding the tough choices looming — raise taxes or cut spending further.

And the same is true for the still more consequential matters of war and peace — barely a word from the two governing parties on Gaza, on Ukraine, on the cold war with China and the hot war clearly coming into view.

So from July 5, life will continue as before, until it doesn’t any more.

That does not mean that the last six weeks have been entirely devoid of interest. Two features should command further reflection.

First, the racism. That Keir Starmer stumbles on this question time and again, and that Nigel Farage has been able to place himself at the centre of the electoral action despite having no chance whatsoever of forming a government, or even leading a parliamentary group of any numerical significance, tells its own story.

This is a two-sided tale. One is that the national-populist fever, with racism as its main calling card, is already spreading among us. It is not new, rooted as it is in imperialism and Enoch Powell’s vituperations but it has acquired a fresh virulence in the age of failed, post-2008, capitalist globalisation.

It has conquered the receptive half of the Tory Party and is amplified by such venerable organs as the Telegraph and start-ups like GB News. In Farage’s Reform party it offers a particularly odious mixture of chauvinism and neoliberalism, attracting to its banner semi-fascist sadists along with the simply alienated.

The other side is the willingness of what passes for “mainstream” politics to pander to it. The Tory Party of Boris Johnson and Liz Truss, and up to a point even Rishi Sunak, agrees with the main premises of course. But what of Labour?

When I suggest that Starmer “stumbles” on this matter, I could as well have written “dog-whistles.” There is no other sensible reading of this tightly controlled politician in a closely scripted campaign repeatedly saying or doing things that indicate he believes black people in Britain are on some kind of sufferance.

Of course, Labour needs the votes both of black people and of all people who abhor racism, so it has to take a Goldilocks approach, neither too hot nor too cold, to let the prejudiced know that the party is “on their side” without outraging progressive sensibilities.

Whether Starmer is racist by intent, or is simply trying to avoid any drift of Labour voters in pro-Brexit areas to Reform is not the main issue. It is that the political Establishment continues to facilitate the rise of national-populism, both by its own social and economic failures and through indulging its ideological presumptions.

Farage has told us his sights are set on 2029, after five years of Starmerite administration. He has, incredibly, managed to make much of the weather in this election, so his ambitions cannot be shrugged off.

There is a clear battle front — but how to form up in this fight for the future? Here is the second reflection on six weeks’ campaigning, about ways out of the apathy.

There have been zones of political enthusiasm — it was in the Chingford church hall endorsing Faiza Shaheen, in the Bristol back garden full of Green campaigners, at the Palestine concert and rally with Andrew Feinstein, Leanne Mohamad and Tanushka Marah, and on the streets of Islington North for Jeremy Corbyn.

Much, although not all, of this has been under the banner of “independence.” Independent from parties, and independent of each other for the most part. Some brilliant campaigns have been fought in this election under that rubric, but it is not sufficient for the future.

For one thing, it denies candidates the benefits, political and financial, of being part of some broader identity which can extend the reach of everyone under its umbrella.

For another, it encourages a spirit of hyper-localism and individuality, rather than the creation of a governing project.

Voters know that in general elections they are voting on how the country should be run, rather than the merits of the individuals standing in their particular constituencies.

Having a governing project is not the same thing as being a likely government. Neither Reform nor the Greens will form the next government, yet both set out programmes which address big questions about the future of the country and the world.

To do that, you need some form or other of a “party,” even if it is a front or an alliance. Parties are not bad things, nor are parties with a sense of collective responsibility worse ones.

They should not be set against being embedded in the cares and concerns of your own community. Generations of Communist local candidates were thus embedded, but their very political designation also associated them with big ideas and projects — none bigger, in fact.

Denied any say in the direction of the Labour Party, or almost any capacity to dissent within it, the left has not been able to make a coherent “big politics” electoral offer.

That is no criticism of the independent left and pro-Gaza candidates. Most are “independent” through circumstance, not choice. And their campaigns have been oases of hope for the future of socialism in an electoral landscape that has seldom been as arid — the future looks like Feinstein, Mohamad and Shaheen.

Nor is it to belittle those organisations which have run candidates, mostly the Workers Party but also the Communist Party and the Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition.

But their efforts, a handful of candidates aside, including most obviously George Galloway, have been peripheral to the campaign.

So the Corbynite and pro-Gaza left have to move beyond “independence” after July 4. However many left-of-Labour candidates win, and the number cannot be other than very small, their aggregated vote will surely be the largest ever.

How that socialist and anti-imperialist network moves forward, particularly how it relates to the left remaining in the Labour Party and the mass movements of struggle in the streets and the unions will shape the future as much as Thursday’s outcome.

It will emerge on July 5 with a base, but a base is only a base if you stand upon it. Otherwise it’s a ruin. Time to build.

Sunak the pioneer?

READER Ian McKillop suggests that Ramsay MacDonald provides a precedent for a prime minister losing their seat at a general election.

MacDonald was indeed defeated in his Seaham constituency in the October 1935 general election, but he had resigned as premier in June of the same year. At the time of his ouster from the Commons he was only a back-bench MP.

If Rishi Sunak does lose his seat tomorrow he will be the first premier to be so humiliated.