I find myself a bit jealous of the Scots and the French. Admittedly I enjoy elections full stop, however and wherever, but these neighbours of ours appear to be having what I think of as real elections: old-fashioned slugging bouts with ideology and political parties who stand for instantly identifiable things. Differentiate between Labour and the SNP north of the Border? Easy. Scottish independence. Between Ségolène Royal and Nicolas Sarkozy? Of course: the Socialist and the rightwinger. And an 85 per cent turnout! We can only gasp in awe. Good for the French.

Of course there are caveats: does she really believe . . . ? Do the Scots really want . . . ? But the outline of the contest is clear. Like Tony Benn and Ann Widdecombe on their popular speaking tours, like Boris Yeltsin in his heyday, or Boris Johnson “putting his foot in it” again — here is conviction, here is argument, here is plainspeaking. We like and respect it, even if we do not agree with the opinion.

For the British, drifting into a potential two-year election campaign stuck in the ever-shrinking centre ground, our main parties dancing cautiously on pinheads, the sight of real politics is invigorating. It feels like you could breathe in Scotland and in France; debate serious issues, not whether a small percentage difference in a rise in GDP would “destroy the health service” or a twiddle to tax credits might shatter social progress.

British electoral politics is dominated by visions of defeat. People no longer win elections; they only avoid losing them. Campaigns are wary, defensive, dishonest and cowardly, and the electorate responds by refusing to vote. Rhetoric fills the vacuum where bold policy should be; new Labour was never so cautious as when it claimed to be radical.

David Cameron protested this week that politics too often treats citizens like children, by pretending to be able to solve everything with an initiative or a new law. “Think of the messages parents give children from an early age. Be careful. Don’t do that. Do it this way. I’ll do that for you. That seems to me a fair summary of most of the messages that government gives the public. We are infantilising people — treating them like children, with the result that many of us are behaving like children.” The days of government solving a social problem with a summit, an initiative and a five-point plan are dead. But crowding onto the centre ground to appeal to an ever-narrower band of swing voters and then pretending there is a great choice before them patronises the electorate, too.

This lack of courage has fed a crisis in British democracy, bred partly by that infantilised belief that it’s up to “them” to make things better, partly by the knowledge that too often participation doesn’t make any difference or is stifled by bureaucracy. This makes it harder and harder to fill vacancies in our democratic system at grassroots levels, such as parish councils and school governing bodies.

When people do put themselves forward as leaders, we jeer and hector them. We moan. We whine. We dissect their personalities as if they are characters on a reality television show. And where are the worst examples of this behaviour? Right at the top. Next time you brand Gordon Brown dour and sulky, Mr Cameron, do not talk to us about infantilising politics. Next time your henchmen attack Mr Cameron for being a posh airhead, Mr Brown, do not lecture us about turning our backs on the politics of personality.

Labour’s failure to find a serious challenger to Mr Brown for No 10 only drips further water on to the embers of what ought to be our flaming democracy: it looks as if the party cannot be bothered, as if it lacks the heart and possibly even the questions for a debate. Mr Brown’s “fait accompli” premiership will be weakened by that.

And the candidates for the Labour deputy leadership, those proposing themselves as Deputy Prime Minister of the United Kingdom? Force majeure! What does Peter Hain promise? “Real renewal”, a — what do you know — “ten-point plan to renew democracy”. Hazel Blears has been handing out “Hazel Beers” beer mats (no, I am not making this up), and Harriet Harman proposes [drum roll] “a new pledge card ten years after our last one”. This has been, so far, a pathetic excuse for a debate.

The only candidate who seems not to have disappeared up his own cul de sac — and the only one to have stated he does not want to be Deputy Prime Minister, with all its flashy trappings, but deputy party leader — is the Dagenham MP, Jon Cruddas, the least known and most interesting of them all. But then he hails from an area of London where they can see at first-hand the impact of closing down serious debate on difficult issues (immigration, the rise of the BNP) that matter to people on the ground: “We triangulate around immigration and collude in the demonisation of the migrant whilst relying on the same people to rebuild our public and private services and make our labour markets more flexible.” Discuss.

“We don’t live in a classless meritocratic new Labour nirvana, right?” says the man who advised Tony Blair in No 10 throughout his first term. What refreshing plainspeak. Allow me to offer you Mr Cruddas’s opinion of his rivals for the post: “They’re playing smoke and mirrors to find themselves. After ten years of doing the nodding-dog routine, they try to reinvent themselves as more radical.”

He is so unafraid of debate it goes without saying that Mr Cruddas is derided by “proper” politicians (ie, the ones who calibrate every utterance before speaking it) as being somewhere nearer barking than Dagenham. Which enables them to write him off. Which, come to think of it, is what the French political establishment at first did with Ms Royal. Vive la différence.

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