Monday 15 April 2013

Party Election Broadcasts

With the English local elections less than 3 weeks away, the party election broadcasts are being aired.

The Tories have turned to the UKIP manifesto for their party election broadcast, focussing on tax and the deficit.  They claim that income tax has gone down, that petrol prices have gone down and that people are "quite impressed" with their efforts to reduce the deficit.  Income tax has, of course, gone down for high earners but none of the actors ordinary people they spoke to in the street looked like they earned more than £100k.  Petrol prices have gone up over 40p per litre in the last 5 years and the price is going up and up all the time.  The deficit was down by a considerable amount in February but it was a one-off thanks to a windfall from the Bank of England and the sale of 4G mobile phone spectrum.  The national debt is rising year on year to pay for unsustainable levels of public spending.

Labour's party election broadcast was also clearly influenced by the UKIP manifesto and was all about immigration and immigrants learning English.  Multi-millionaire socialist David Miliband droned on about how immigration was a great thing but that it must be made to work for everyone.  He said that more investment was needed in English language teaching to teach immigrants how to speak English and that teaching immigrants English was more important than most non-essential translation services.  He said that Labour would make it law that public sector workers working face to face with the public had to speak English which will no doubt upset the Welsh who have Welsh language requirements for the same jobs.  This is, he tells us, what "One Nation Britain" is about.  So the party that by its own admission deliberately introduced unfettered immigration as part of a social engineering experiment and is wholeheartedly in favour of deeper integration with the EU which is responsible for our inability to control the majority of immigration into the country is asking voters to trust them to make immigration "work for everyone".

UKIP's first party election broadcast will be aired tonight at 17:55 on BBC2, 18:25 on ITV1 and 18:55 on BBC1.  The second will be aired on St George's Day.