The Conservative Party has released a YouTube video on Webcameron attacking Labour’s record. It is a piece of political distraction as the only interesting thing about it is its timing.
The video begins with dark skies and stark piano notes and the line: “To our successors we leave no money only waste, debut and the deepest cuts of modern times.”
Will those will be the cuts that the coalition government is implementing then? The same cuts that are driven not by simple economic austerity but by an ideological zeal that the recent Fabian/Landman Economics study said would hit the poor six times harder than the very richest.
Not only the poor, but the poor and those who work for the state as the Tories launch what has been described as a libertarian push to eliminate parts of that state — highlighted yesterday by the enthusiasm Ken Clarke is exhibiting for cuts to the Ministry of Justice.
Is there any other reason to launch such a video? Other than to distract and spread disinformation that the cuts people are set to experience are entirely the fault of Labour?
No one denies that had a Labour government won power it would have to make cuts of its own, but it is the nature of these deeply unfair cuts and how they are being used in part to as a smoke screen for an ideological attack on the welfare state.
The ideological nature of the changes the Tory-led coalition are making can be seen in other places too highlighted by a post on the Children & Young People’s Now website.
It reveals an internal Department for Education memo that lists 30 terms the government wants consigned to history, and the words that should be used in their place. Some of these changes as the site notes are pointless. For instance “narrow the gap” is to be replaced by “close the gap”, or “delivery” with “implementation”. Likewise, “Integrated working” and “people working together to provide better services” is in.
“But despite initial appearances, this is no silly-season story. The list goes beyond phrases that became tedious jargon under the previous administration. It includes the pillars of recent children’s policy, namely Every Child Matters (ECM) and the five outcomes, and children’s trusts. To this government, these terms clearly reek too strongly of Labour, while ECM in particular speaks of a grand project that is anathema to the coalition’s thinking.”