Wednesday, May 07, 2014

Liberal Democrat local election campaign launch falls short

I attended a conference panel debate this afternoon in which the participants were talking about children with special educational needs and how services can meet those needs in an era of diminished local authority budgets.

Then this evening I read about yesterday’s launch of the Liberal Democrat local election campaign. This seems to be based around a document detailing “Labour & Tory Incompetence & Waste".

According to the comment thread on Liberal Democrat Voice, these examples have been culled from the Daily Mail and the Taxpayers’ Alliance. And some of them, not surprisingly, start to unravel when you look at them closely.

This really is not good enough. Every informed voter knows that local authorities are facing enormous cuts in their funding.

Is the Liberal Democrat answer to people concerned about children with special educational needs really to say we could do all we want for them if only councils did not spend money on magicians or hamster welfare?

And do we expect them to be impressed by this?

2 comments:

James said...

There is some comfort to be taken in that not one person in 100,000 will give a nun's fart about any of this.

Phil Beesley said...

I hate inappropriate use of short URL services. Long form URLs are sometimes meaningful (search on the web for discussions about 'semantic URL'), and perpetual or long term URLs may be of use to researchers in 20 years time (to discover articles in archives). Usage of short URLs might be necessary on Twitter but when you publish a PDF document, you have all the space that you require for long form links.

And to put it bluntly, never hide a story behind an http://bit.ly URL because you are embarrassed about the source. If you don't like linking to the Daily Mail, don't link full stop.