In a constituency somewhere in South Essex, four leaflets plop through the letter box.

The Conservative leaflet is on the bottom. Because I am hoping they will get buried on Thursday.

One is from the sitting MP. She is a Conservative, but seems a bit shy about that. The leaflet leads with her name in large letters. If you look really hard you can see the word “Conservative” in tiny letters tucked into the bottom right corner in an attempt not to draw too much attention to itself, with that squiggly tree logo, from their greenwash phase, tucked alongside. Just so you don’t forget what she looks like, there are eight photos of her in a single folded A4 leaflet. This is not many by her standards. Her previous one had thirteen! An MP since 2010 and only briefly a junior minister, under Liz Truss, so definitely not front rank. The usual phative slogans – A Secure Future – A Brighter Future – are superimposed on a photo of the candidate looking away from the camera into the middle distance with a slightly constipated expression, while standing on a footbridge over a busy road and, hopefully, not breathing in too hard. Roads loom large in her pitch too, the solution to traffic congestion being to build more of them. Her Ayn Randish vision of the constituency as “the best it can be” is a curiously dated hyperdevelopmentalism, in which hopefully the whole area will be tarmaced over and full of commerce freed from red tape and taxation rushing products in and out and through. Not a “green and pleasant” vision, however you look at it. The only remaining trees will probably be the tiny ones on Conservative leaflets. Her overall pitch of development for “our (sic) local priorities”, which is a bit previous in assuming that everyone else’s local priorities are the same as hers, with the Council – run and bankrupted by her Party until May this year – posed as the enemy and a Labour controlled Westminster, possibly with a “huge majority”, even more so. Its hard to tell who she is referring to when she says “our”. Perhaps she is just giving herself airs and using the majestic pronoun. There is, nevertheless, a whiff of panic about it.

A standard cut and paste job from Reform, in varying shades of blue, uses a template photomontaging images of Nigel Farage looking upwards like a toad in search of heavenly inspiration while holding his hands together in cut price man of destiny pose no.3 and Richard Tice – on a slightly smaller scale, so you get the heirarchy right – pointing up at the slogan “Vote Reform UK on July 4th”, while smiling to indicate this is a happy prospect. The candidate and constituency are slotted in to a small panel at the top. The sort of leaflet that sometimes gets rushed out with “insert name of candidate here” if the Party agent has had a rough night before proof reading it. The front page has two slogans against immigration but tosses in two others – make work pay – zero waiting lists – with no elaboration at all on how this might be done. Given the overall tenor of their politics the former might be achieved by starving the jobless and the latter by weeding the undeserving out of the queue, especailly “immigrants”. The entire reverse side attacks immigration on the argument that freezing it will make life better, in the same way that Brexit made life better presumably. Fool me once… A leaflet aimed at generating knee jerk reactions, not convincing anyone who doesn’t already have them. The Nastier Party.

The Lib Dems have a busy little leaflet that, oddly for them, does not contain a bar chart saying that only the Lib Dems can win here – perhaps because everyone knows they never have, and it wouldn’t wash. Instead, they have a little panel referring to a by election in an unnamed other constituency at an unnamed date, which shows that “Lib Dems can win anywhere”. With a long local record of lost deposits and no local councillors, I wouldn’t bet on that. Beyond that, they have a potted biography of their candidate, which is at least a human touch, but implies that he’s doing this to get elected as a councillor somewhere at some point in the future. The pledges – under the rubric For a Fair Deal – are positive but vague, like ” a fair plan to protect the poor and pensioners, tackle soaring prices and get our economy back on track”. Yes, but, what is it?

Labour, breaking the mould in this case, sends a letter, not from the local candidate but from Keir Starmer. This might be considered an odd choice as Starmer is far less popular than the Party; with a favourability rating of -19. The heading has a smiling Keir, with no tie on to show that he is relaxed and getting on with rolling his shirt sleeves up, staring confidently from right to left, into a future that is just off the page, superimposed on half a Union Jack that doubles up as an arrow pointing towards the word Change, with his name underneath it, in case anyone doesn’t recognise him. At this point, this should not be taken as an injunction on the Party to “change Keir Starmer”, though perhaps the designer has a sense of humour. The pitch is a simple one. There are two possible governments and “versions of Britain” posed as “Conservative chaos” vs “Britain rebuilt by Labour”. “Rebuilt” is an interesting word, as to some people it will mean “transformed” to others it will mean “restored”. On the one hand, the future. On the other, the past. Perfectly pitched for the sort of voters who preferred it in the good old days, when life was harder; and want a future just like it. The pledges are either oddly limited and specific – Recruit 6,500 teachers – or – Set up Great British Energy – too limited and specific to make a serious dent in the problems they purport to address, or magnificently vague – Deliver economic stability – Cut NHS waiting times (a phrase that begs the questions, to how long, by when?) while economic stability can mean solid, reliable, not flaky (like Liz Truss) but it can also mean immobile; not collapsing but not transforming either. Steady as she goes is not full steam ahead. Perhaps Small Change would be a better title.

Every one of these leafets is a parochial and infantilist retail offer. Vote for us and we will do this that or the other on your behalf, or, vote for us and we will take out your frustrations on someone who is worse off than you are. Looking at them, you wouldn’t think that this election is being held under the shadow of two wars in which the UK is complicit, one of them threatening nuclear war and the other a slow moving genocide, and an accelerating pace of climate breakdown that is risking serious global food shortages within a decade. The challenges facing us on a world scale to draw back from confrontation, seek a peaceful modus vivendi in which we can limit the climate damage are titanic. It is a sign of a crisis of leadership that not one of these leaflets seriously addresses these issues, or treats voters as citizens capable of doing so themselves.