THE TABLET: Voters are not daft enough to swallow the line that taxes and hospital waiting lists can both be cut

No-one minds a bit of a row and of course the party leaders must be exhausted but the crossness and mean-spiritedness of much of the current election campaign – the snappiness, the lack of courtesy, of humour, of any hint that there might be something to be said for a position taken by one’s opponent – have been dispiriting.

Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and Labour Party leader Sir Keir Starmer.

The incumbent prime minister and his presumed replacement are decent men but their shared assumption that we are daft enough to swallow the line that taxes and hospital waiting lists can both be cut has been a little insulting.

The lack of attention and tenderness over the past few weeks towards the most vulnerable, the poor, the disabled, the dying suggests the fading of a sensibility that prioritises the least among us, that takes it as read that character matters more than achievement, that charity and humility and beauty matter more than worldly honour.

Our reservoir of social capital, “the common good” in the argot of Catholic social teaching, to which everyone contributes and from everyone benefits, is emptying. In our leader column, we point out that Britain has been governed by a generation of politicians mesmerised by the seductions of low taxation and deregulation.

“The fundamental challenge to Labour as it braces itself to form a government is whether it has learnt this crucial lesson of Tory failure,” we write.

In her column, Julia Langdon laments “the utter shambles of the Conservative Party’s campaign … as it hurtles its screaming occupants down democracy’s Big Dipper towards 4 July”.

Nicholas Boyle writes that the one issue that has not been addressed during the campaign is the most important of all: the constitution of the United Kingdom.

“If the parties competing for office were really addressing the national post-Brexit malaise, we should be hearing some discussions very different from the present empty debate about side issues, mostly minor changes to taxation, which everyone knows will rise anyway.”

The election is also on the minds of contributors to the Tablet’s Letters pages. Michael Knowles is voting Labour; John Woodhouse is going Green; Francis Davis decries Labour’s proposal to apply VAT to school fees for private schools as “incoherent”; and electoral reform is top of John Mulholland’s suggested to-do list for the new government.