Category: education

“Dear friend, please don’t vote Tory!”

Posted by Tank team – April 26, 2010

I was downhearted today to learn that a good friend at work is planning to vote Conservative.
Why? Because Gordon Brown “looks like such a loser”, for one. “He needs a serious makeover.”
As for Nick Clegg, “he just seems like a liar”. That only leaves Cameron, and “we need a change – we need something new,” she concluded.
Observations like these cannot, and should not, be dismissed. I have decided to set out my response to them here…

Dear friend,
You know I’m a Labour supporter and obviously we disagree on this. But allow me to give, briefly (if I can), a few good reasons not to vote Tory.
I’m doing this because there are many lovely, decent, kind, smart people like you who are being hoodwinked by the Conservatives’ airbrushed campaign.
The Tories pretend they’ve changed, but they haven’t; and in government they would wreak at least as much carnage as they did in the 1980s.

1) It’s not how you look, it’s what you do. It would be a shame to judge Gordon Brown harshly on the basis of his greater age (or girth!) compared with the other party leaders. Brown showed excellent judgement and leadership during the economic crisis. The Tories got every call wrong. Brown is highly respected and liked by world leaders including Barack Obama, Nicolas Sarkozy and Angela Merckel. They have no respect for Cameron. And Clegg is an unknown.

Gordon Brown: substance over style, as it should be in a world leader

2 The Tories will close Sure Start, depriving millions of parents and young children of services and guidance they need to get a decent start in life. That just isn’t fair.

3 The Tories will cut regional development agencies, turning northern and rural regions into an economic disaster area.

4 Despite feeble claims to the contrary, the Tories will decimate the NHS. They are ideologically utterly opposed to it and were linked with various hard right anti-healthcare-reform groups in the US.

5 The Tories will smash up the BBC, slashing state funding, interfering in programming and throwing the service on the mercy of market forces. That will mean no innovation, no creativity and no risk taking. Everything we hold dear about the Beeb will be destroyed.

David Tennant and Catherine Tate: among celebrities who last week signed a letter to the Observer expressing concern over Tory "attacks" on the BBC

6 The Tories will cut funding to state education, which is in a dire enough state already. Even Tory headteachers have warned that this will happen.

7 The Tories are implacably opposed to proportional representation. Please don’t be taken in by Cameron’s pretence at moving towards electoral reform. His party won’t let him. That means that under the Tories, we will continue to have a voting system in which most people’s votes are irrelevant and parties govern on a minority vote. It’s not right. Labour and the Lib Dems want to change it; the Tories don’t.

8 The Tories will bring back fox hunting – a barbaric, cruel and sickening way for sadists to have fun. British people pride themselves on being a nation of animal lovers. There’s no place for fox hunting in a civilised, modern society.

Aren't we sufficiently civilised as a nation not to allow sadists to tear this litle chap to pieces with dogs?

How you vote is your choice, as it should be, but please bear these things in mind. Cameron may have a better make-up artist, a better airbrusher, a better tailor and all the easy charm his background confers, but that doesn’t make him a safe person to lead our country.

With love

X x x

Cameron pre- and post- airbrushing. Click on the pic for a close-up. Not quite so young and smooth after all. Are you quite sure you trust him?

Boobs aren’t news

Posted by Tank team – March 17, 2010

Bloggerheads author Tim Ireland has reminded us today of the Sun newspaper’s misleading practice of using young ladies with their tops off to peddle its hateful opinions as ‘news’ on page 3.
Today it has attained new levels of insulting the intelligence of its readers by having a girl with her breasts out purportedly attack the Unite union and (with absolutely no irony) quote Orwell. Anyone who has actually read Nineteen Eighty-Four will recall the steady diet of mendacious, manipulative pablum that is fed to the ‘proles’ as entertainment. If anything is Orwellian, it is the editorial policy of the Sun.

Tim last year began a highly commendable information campaign challenging the Sun’s shabby packaging of boobs’n'bigotry as fact. Find out more about it here: http://bit.ly/page-3

Where’s your conviction, Dave?

Posted by Tank team – March 9, 2010

Normal service resuming shortly

First of all, apologies for the lack of updates this past week. One half of Team Tank sustained a nasty head injury descending the stairs of a bus head first, and the other half has been occupied full time as Big Tank Nurse.

Why the Tory vote is sliding

The past week has certainly been a long time in politics, with the Tories continuing to slide down the polls and now slipping behind Labour in 100 key marginals.

Numerous factors are contributing to their failing fortunes, but it is not just the Lord ‘Cashcroft’ tax dodging/marginal-campaign-coffer-stuffing scandal, or revelations about the extreme right wing Young Britons’ Foundation’s ‘Tory Madrasa’ training Con activists (with tacit approval from top Tories such as Eric Pickles). It’s not even Michael Gove’s shockingly misinformed comments about Tory education policy, in which children would sit in lines and recite the kings and queens of England. (‘History should be taught in order; it’s a narrative’, he opined, bringing to mind Alice in Wonderland).

What seems to be hurting the Tories more than anything is not these individual scandals and gaffes but the fact that the electorate are realising that the Tories only actually stand for one thing: getting the Tories into power. They will say absolutely anything to this end, with the result that now no-one believes anything they say.

Even Margaret Thatcher, who visited so much evil on Britain, had total conviction. She believed absolutely that her way was right and many people voted for her (unfortunately) because they responded to that sense of conviction. Cameron has none of this. His party are now reduced to saying absolutely anything that might get them a vote. It’s embarrassing to behold. Many voters remember all too well the terrible damage the Thatcher years did to Britain. Despite the unconvincing claims of compassion and progressiveness (which themselves are causing deep rifts in the party) people are still seeing the same old Tories and the nasty party of yore. But unlike Thatcher, Cameron’s Tories are dissembling frantically about what, if anything, they actually stand for.

Link to Labour’s campaign

Team Tank’s members have been very critical of ‘New’ Labour in the past, especially over the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. But voting Labour is now the only way to go to prevent the untrustworthy Tory rabble from gaining power in the UK, with catastrophic consequences.

If you have a blog/website or just post on forums, Twitter, Facebook etc, give Labour’s online campaign a boost by adding or posting the following link:

http://www.AFutureFairForAll.com

The more links there are to Labour’s campaign site, the better its profile on Google will be.

Britain isn’t broken – The Economist

Posted by Tank team – February 18, 2010

An article on the Economist website  puts the lie to Conservative claims that Britain is ‘broken’.

The article states:  “Stepping back from the glare of the latest appalling tale, it is clear that by most measures things have been getting better for a good decade and a half. In suggesting that the rot runs right through society, the Tories fail to pinpoint the areas where genuine crises persist. The broken-Britain myth is worse than scaremongering—it glosses over those who need help most.”

This will come as a blow to the Tories, who are pinning their election hopes on the myth that Labour has ‘broken’ Britain and only a clique of Etonians can put it back together again.

Most UK voters are old enough to remember that it was, in fact, successive Conservative governments in the 1980s that broke Britain, creating mass unemployment and wrecking state education,  the health service and the country’s manufacturing industries. Every disaffected hoodie is the child of people who were thrown on the scrapheap by Margaret Thatcher.  Now official Tory blogs are mocking those victims of Thatcherism in spoof Labour posters.

If the Tories have no regrets about their past actions, and laugh at those whose livelihoods – and lives – they wrecked, how can anyone trust them to run Britain again?

Introducing…

Posted by Tank team – February 10, 2010