Challenging the status quo

Electioneering has cast us as judges of some beautiful baby contest, ridiculing screams from the radical prams of the BNP and Ukip. But the left might as well have been thrown out with the bathwater.

The timely release of American: The Bill Hicks Story reminds us it's a chronic condition. Stand-up Hicks picked up Lenny Bruce's satiric baton, but after he died at 32, he passed it on to a generation of US and British comics unafraid to challenge the socio-political status quo.

But in this post-Dubya decade, they've gone pretty quiet, along with any whisper of populist political analysis. The silence is easy enough to excuse in a US trying to face up to its fear factor.

Hicks said: "They don't want you to talk about ideas on TV." Lenny said: "Take away the right to say 'fuck' and you take away the right to say 'fuck the government'."

But if Britain hasn't completely cloned-out to the US, where is our voice of the left?

Having listened in vain to radio phone-ins, Paxman probes and Tweedledimbleby panels, I turned to my friend - the very funny, the very incisive social satirist, let's hear it ladies and gentlemen for the one and only Mark Thomas!

Generously taking time out from writing his book, he tried to reply.

I'm not going to lie to you, ladies and gents. After dissecting the legacy of Brand and Ross budgets versus cheap comedy panellists who can be funny so long as they don't offend, Thomas finally fessed up.

"I don't know."

And there was sad resignation in his voice.

If someone as politically savvy as Thomas finds it hard to explain why, for instance, the BBC is running scared of the Daily Mail or why its Directors' Trust has "turned into an apologist for Frankie Boyle," who will address the encroaching blandness of British politics.

British broadcasters and every national newspaper except the Morning Star used the election to redecorate political analysis.

For a moment I thought one Con-Dem comment spot on the BBC News Channel was going to address fundamental differences between the coalition twins, but it turned out the woman was a body language expert.

That's not even soft politics. It's detumescent.

Could the BBC find no-one to the left of sycophancy? Someone cogent like Tariq Ali. Oh, wait. It did. He was interviewed about the Milibands' mum. Cosy and apolitical.

Thomas is convinced that the trade unions should pull the plug on Labour funding and back the left. If it can be found. Maybe politics really is changing and the coalition years will allow the fragmented left to coalesce and stop new Labour kicking sand in its eyes.

Or maybe, as Thomas has concluded, it's time to back a green agenda, making connections between class issues and the future of the planet.

Meanwhile, Ken Loach's Route Irish about the Iraq war is about to bring the voice of the left to Cannes.