Cut ‘n’ Paste like a knife
This from the Independent’s Pandora column:
Yesterday, Labour MPs were ordered to fill in an “identikit” press release, trumpeting a headline-grabbing scheme the Government wants to dominate the news agenda: a nationwide knives amnesty.
A letter, signed by the party’s director of political services, Fiona Gordon, told them to take part in a photo-call, before sending a (seemingly) personal press release to local newspapers.
The dummy press release, leaked to this column yesterday, contains several blanks, which MPs are asked to complete in order to pass the whole thing off as their own work.
“(Insert name) MP endorsed the drive to tackle knife crime and violence in (insert area) and across the UK,” reads one. “(Insert name) MP said: “This knife amnesty is about creating safer streets throughout (insert area).”
Only time will tell how many MPs filled in the release. “Anyone who does is a total drone,” says one.
Step forward, then, Lynne Jones, David Lepper, Russell Brown, Tony Cunningham, Sadiq Khan, John Spellar, Sandra Osborne, Helen Jones, Alan Whitehead, Alan Campbell, John Hutton (the cabinet minister, no less), Diana Johnson, Betty Williams, Dawn Butler, Gisela Stuart, Sian James, Andrew Gwynne and Hazel Blears (for it is she) and Rob Marris. There may be more.
Much propaganda is based around the truisms of two famous sayings “You can fool all the people some of the time” and “There’s one born every minute“. Do you know who first coined them?
It was me.
Posted on May 11th, 2006 at 11:05 am
| See also • The enviable life of Jack Straw • A level playing field: treat everybody like scum • Has anybody seen Sam Lowry? |
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Filed under New Labour, UK politics |
I’m not sure if it’s the Indy who’ve fallen into a time warp over this, but the announcements on the total drones’ websites (at least the couple I looked at, including that of my own dear Sadiq Khan) are dated 16th February. If this was intended to “dominate the news agenda”, well, it passedd me by entirely.
Yep, having another flick through, you’re right. The push was in Feb - it must have taken until now for the press release to leak.
[...] Cut ‘n’ Paste like a knife. Hazel Blears and others fill in the blanks. [...]
Not wanting to defend Labour or anything, but I picked Ken Livingstone and Paul Boateng up for doing this when I was on the Kilburn Times back in the late 1990s and they sent us identical identikit releases on education. One of them - probably Ken, as he spoke to us more - argued quite reasonably that if you’re a busy MP and you do in fact agree with everything in a draft release then why not save yourself a bit of time and send it out?
Even better is the grammar error in the original template - “This knife amnesty is about to creating safer streets throughout” - which has been faithfully copied, obviously without reading, in the “MP quote”, by 10 different MPs, according to a Google search.