Do Advertising Standards Authority codes apply to election literature? If they did I think the Walthamstow Labour Party might have one or two problems with their latest leaflet headed `Eight screen cinema for Walthamstow!' (pictured above).
The Yahoo! Walthamstow Group has already had a number of contributors saying Labour's claim that `only Labour has worked to get a cinema for Walthamstow' is not true. I would also like to see some evidence to support the claim that `the Tories and Lib Dems ... will vote together to block [it]'. The whole saga of what has happened to the EMD cinema (closed down and bought up by the UKCG) is still very murky. What do Labour intend to do about it? Is it their policy to try to get it back into use as a cinema (which does have considerable local support, after all) or are they against this idea? If the latter, what is going to happen to it? We are none the wiser. Unfortunately, this leaflet smacks of electoral opportunism.
But things go from bad to worse with the accompanying leaflet designed to play the `law & order' card. Look at the two pictures (under the heading `Please don't think all political parties are the same. There is a real difference between Labour and Liberal Democrats). In the picture on the left, we see a group of three police officers in a residential street (which I somehow suspect is not even in Walthamstow); in the picture on the right we see three youths in hoodies walking away from the camera. Clearly, we are supposed to think that under Labour there are more police on the streets, whereas under the Lib Dems the streets are full of young criminals. Is there any evidence to suggest there is any difference between Councils run by Labour and those run by the Lib Dems? The leaflet doesn't provide any.
And what about those pictures. For a start, young people wearing hoodies are not automatically criminals and I, for one, do not appreciate this stereotyping of them to make cheap political points. Tony Blair famously claimed that he would be `tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime', but he only ever seems to consider the former, never the latter. The Walthamstow Guardian letters page (letters page not online) has published a number of letters pointing out the lack of facilities for young people.
For example, a correspondent called Midge Broadley had a letter published on the 6th April with this, `I have long felt the only message yong people are getting these days is "Buzz off, you're not wanted here". For years the Council's youth services budget has been cherry-picked to support other services and maybe the time has come for the balance to be redressed'. If Labour want to reduce crime - a laudable aim - they shouldn't just bang on about ASBOs all the time. What about positive efforts to reduce the causes of crime, like giving young people positive opportunities?
And do we want our streets saturated with policemen? The police force that played such an infamous role in the miners' strike of 1984-85, and that shot Jean Charles de Menezes, is not particularly trustworthy as far as I am concerned. Another blogger has discussed the difference between low and high policing; the former being the attention to the prevention and detection of the crimes that affect people the most, and the latter being the kind of political policing that New Labour are doing their damnedest to introduce. So if New Labour have their way, in future years the police will be spending ever larger portions of their time demanding to see your ID card, and ensuring that your personal details are on the national identity database, arresting people who fail to notify the government that they have changed their address, etc. Is that what most people want?
I would bet you that when it comes to policing, what most people want would be something like Heartbeat on ITV. If New Labour have their way, what they will get will be more like Orwell's 1984. Sorry, Walthamstow Labour Party, I don't think you have anything to boast about.
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