The following is an article by Leo McKinstry of the Express and I have to stress that this is what we have been saying for a long, long time...
In its desperation to cling on to power, Labour’s abuse of office has become outrageous.
Gordon Brown’s Government increasingly resembles one of those discredited and corrupt regimes of the former Eastern bloc: aggressively partisan, contemptuous of democracy and blind to any distinction between the interests of the party and those of the nation.
A key hallmark of totalitarian Communist rule was its obsession with trying to indoctrinate
the public through political propaganda. Until recently, the idea that such an approach might be adopted in Britain would have seemed laughable.
But all that has changed under Labour. The years of Blair and Brown have been dominated by spin. The machine of the state is now devoted to the imposition of socialist ideology.
The airwaves and billboards are filled with Left-wing propaganda dressed up as public information or as “awareness-raising” programmes. Two incidents over the weekend brought home to me the extent of the naked political bias in the public sector.
First I was in a newsagents when I noticed a large pile of glossy brochures near the cash tills. The publication was entitled Britain In 2010 and the cover was full of such classic Brownite slogans as: “the road to economic recovery”; “lower carbon growth for a greener planet”; and “making tough choices”. I genuinely thought for a moment that this was an advance version of Labour’s election manifesto.
ONLY on closer inspection did I find that it was actually a booklet from a quango called the Economic and Social Research Council, which has an annual budget of £181million paid for, of course, by the taxpayer. It is all too typical of the modern quangocracy that it should be so eager to adopt the language and outlook of the Labour Government.
The second incident was even worse. Looking through some political blogs on the internet I came across a disgraceful video clip posted by a primary school in Hackney.
This featured a group of young children who had been instructed by their teacher to chant a rap song eulogising the local Labour MP, the highly controversial Left-winger Diane Abbott. In this nauseating performance the pupils sang of Diane Abbott’s wonderful achievements, including her campaigns for equality and women’s rights. Once they had finished they held up large pictures of Abbott’s beaming socialist visage. It was just like something out of the People’s Communist republic of North Korea.
It is a depressing sign of how far the state education sector has succumbed to Labour’s dogma that a teacher could actually think this flagrant Left-wing indoctrination is acceptable in our schools.
The same teacher, so brimming with righteous zeal, so anxious to supplicate his socialist masters, would no doubt be appalled at the idea of a group of private school pupils chanting praises to a local Tory MP.
These two cases are just part of the pattern of civic life in Labour’s Britain. Never before in our history have we had a Government so fixated with brainwashing and lecturing the public. The state is now by far Britain’s largest advertiser.
Last year, Brown’s ministers spent no less than £540million of our money on commercials, an increase of 43 per cent on 2008 and as the election approaches the problem is getting worse.
In addition, the number of spin doctors in government has quadrupled since Labour came to power. There are now about 4,000 officials in Whitehall – costing more than £220million – whose job is to communicate the Government’s message.
So much of this vast publicity drive is nothing more than Labour propaganda. Only last week the independent watchdog the Advertising Standards Authority announced a ban on the Home Office’s £5million campaign for something called the “Policing Pledge”, which is designed to give the illusion that the Government is doing something about crime.
As the ASA pointed out, the Home Office’s claim in its adverts that the police spend 80 per cent of their time on the beat is blatantly misleading when the real figure is less than 14 per cent.
Similarly, the ASA ordered a ban on a series of Government commercials about global warming based on children’s nursery rhymes, whose only purpose was to soften up the public for more green taxes and state intervention.
BUT such setbacks will not halt Labour. Deceit and spin are woven into the fabric of the Government’s operations. The impartiality of the civil service has been obliterated. Whitehall publicity is now indistinguishable from Labour output, as can be seen in the current official campaign Building Britain’s Future.
Though this has been presented as an impartial public strategy, in truth it is pure electioneering for Labour. “Thanks to our active intervention the economy is recovering and families have received much needed help,” it trumpets.
The state has been turned into a subsidised arm of the Labour movement. The public propagandists see their primary duty not as serving the British people but as challenging “the forces of conservatism”, to use the notorious phrase of Tony Blair’s.
If Labour wins again it will be partly due to the success of their indoctrination programme.
