Last night Labour released their first party election broadcast for the general election.
It features Sean Pertwee, off of that Bo Selecta spin off, trudging along some long country roads. At the very start he looks at how far at he has to go and makes a noise that the rest of us would express as “Fuck’s sake,” before trying to find a bus stop.
The point of all this is to remind us how grim things have been since the economic collapse, and how we need to keep plodding along with Gordon. Although PM Brown doesn’t feature in the video, his heroic actions to help banks “families and businesses” are referenced constantly.
It’s not a very inspirational message, recognising that after all these years in power, there’s not really anything the Labour Party can promise us, apart from of course cuts “deeper than Thatcher’s” and kicking people off the internet in order to protect the profits of record corporations.
So instead of ‘Things Can Only Get Better,’ we get “Now is not the time to change course.” In other words, grin and bear it.
Of course, it’s not quite as scary as Sean Pertwee’s last Party Political Broadcast, seen below. Watching this effort, it makes us wonder how far Labour’s repression of our desire for a better society will go:
Although, to be fair, it’s unlikely that Labour will ever bring us something as exciting as Gun Kata.
The broadcast ends with a little voiceover from none other than recently retired Timelord David Tennant, although he’s not doing the English accent he had to put on to be Dr Who. He promises us that we can make Britain “the country we all want it to be”, which of course begs the question of how government spending cuts will affect the Torchwood Institute.
But we do advise Labour to be careful about accepting Tennant’s support. He’s proven to be fickle in his political alliances in the past, and his support could prove to be a poisoned chalice:
Sean Pertwee is of course the son of Jon Pertwee, himself a former Timelord. If only the Third Doctor was still around he could perhaps have given some much needed advice on how to spice up the film. Here’s how the Labour election broadcast should have looked. If they had put this out as what Labour had planned for the next few years, they may well have persuaded me to stay the course:
But as it is, all they are in fact offering us is “stick with boring Gordon cos he’s not quite as bad as the Tories.” Hardly “I have a dream!” is it? In fact, we think that this video pretty much accurately sums up the promises for 4 more years of boredom and neoliberalism given in Labour’s broadcast.
Bonus: To see how an election broadcast should be done, check out this.