Ten Years And Five Pledges Later

Rarely has something come along that so confirms my beliefs as the discovery of the Labour Party's Facebook application, iSupport. The idea is actually reasonably clever as a soft vote attractor; the application has a list of Labour's achievements and allows users to endorse those achievements and see how many other people have also endorsed them.

The only trouble is, the list of achievements is as follows;

• Labour banned fox hunting
• Labour has more than doubled overseas aid
• Labour introduced the Minimum Wage
• Labour made pubs and clubs smoke-free
• Labour will help first-time buyers by building 3 million new homes by 2020

Or, as I would describe it;

• Labour banned fox hunting and didn't police it so it's made nark all difference
• Labour left overseas aid well below UN and EU targets while increasing the need for aid by bombing the living s**t out of Iraq
• Labour introduced the Minimum Wage and failed to increase it while using it to actively discriminating against young people
• Labour was forced to make pubs and clubs smoke-free in England because the Scottish and Welsh beat them to it
• Labour will talk as long and loud as possible about building new homes because it's not a construction company, has no ideas for actually achieving that target and hopes that by 2020 the Tories will be in so they can be blamed

If anything fuels my hatred of New Labour, it is the insistence on banging on about the minor achievements while failing to notice the elephant in the room. Still, if Labour want to run their next election on the basis of a facile pledge card like that, bring them on...