All too often elections to the European Parliament have been reduced to not much more than a snapshot of the popularity of each national government.When the United Kingdom votes to elect 72 MEPs -- in what The Times says is the election that “never happened” -- British voters seem destined to give a good kicking not just to the Labour government of Gordon Brown but also to the entire political establishment.
Campaign managers for the general elections of 2001 and 2005 were forced to take account of the impact which the 24-hour television news channels began to exercise over the daily political agenda, a process of readjustment which looks like speeding up yet again due to the influence of bloggers and the expanding audio-visual output of newspaper websites.
