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Labour's false start
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As anyone reading some of my posts might have guessed, we in the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland are currently entering the election silly season. Right now we are in what is known as the pre-election campaign. Offically know one knows when the election is going to be, the joy of our system is such that the Prime Minister decides when to have an election so long as it happens before the end of the fifth Parliamentary session of his majoirty. When he decides, or more correctly, when he assesses that he has the greatest chance of winning, he will call an election by going to Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II and requesting that she dissolve Parliament and hold elections. When this announcement is made we have a two week election campaign and then we vote. Now, as it stands, Blair is in his fourth of a potential five Parliamentary sessions as Prime Minister. We have a general convention in the UK that general elections are held in the summer months to captialise on long daylight hours and "better" weather. We also have a general convention that the election be held on the first Thursday of the month. Given all this it is most likely - and considered pretty probable - that the next general election will be on Thursday May 5th this year. It doesn't have to be then but everyone is pretty sure that is when it is going to happen given the revving up of the Government's own party political campaign headquarters and pre-election posters etc. Basically everyone is getting off the starting blocks for the dissolution of Parliament in approximately three weeks time.
Labour, as I've mentioned before have had a shit time of it in their early campaign. Not only have the Tories been better than them, but they have made some horrendous gaffs which is not like them when one considers the staunch professionalism of their media campaigns in the past. The first big gaff came with their proposals for posters. The party got members to vote on which posters they most wanted to see. Unfortunately these posters got leaked and the content of them caused a mild furore. You see, the leader of the Tory party Michael Howard is a jew, as too is his proposed Chancellor of the Exchequer Oliver Letwin. One of the proposed posters was a depiction of two flying pigs with the faces of Howard and Letwin superimposed on them. Now, the obvious intention of the poster was to draw inference to Tory financial policies with the age old adage "pig might fly". In other words the policies were unbelievable. Of course, no one seemed to notice that depicting two of the highest profile jewish politicians in Britain as pigs might cause a bit of a backlash. Now don't get me wrong, I don't think for a minute that the poster was being deliberately anti-semitic or anything of the sort, I honestly beleive that it was lacking in malice in that sense. However, for no one in the campaign team to pick this up during fielding of designs suggests a lapse in concentration. This is especially the case when the posters came to light in the same week as Holocaust Day. It seems highly likely that the leaking of the posters was politically motivated, but the poster itself was a political gaffe and misjudgment none the less. Labour's argument when some in the Jewish Community complained (including the Chief Rabbi) was that the poster was never meant to be anti-jewish it was meant to be anti-tory.
Sadly though it didn't end there. There was another poster that had been designed for Labour members to vote on. This time Oliver Letwin was the lone target of the poster. It superimposed his face on to a chaacter dressed like Fagin from Oliver Twist and had the by-line that Letwin would "pick a pocket or two" from the people. I think the intention was to refer to the the so-called "Tory cuts" that don't really exist. Of course, for those that might not have noticed, there is a minor problem with this poster as well. You see, the way Dickens describes Fagin in his book is such that the picture is drawn of a nasty evil man with a hook nose that is basically a more Victorian England version of Shylock (a la The Merchant of Venice). When you add the ethnic description to the fact that Fagin is a anagram of the Hebrew word "ganif" which means thief, you basicaly have a recipe for disaster... politically speaking I mean. Again though, as with the other poster, I do not beleive that the intent was one of anti-semitism. However what it does show is a lack of knowledge about history and literature in the Labour campaign team which has caused them two political headaches which could very well have been avoidable. If I were someone high up in Labour I would be firing people for not spotting the potential problems with my posters.
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