'We're all in this together'."
YOU can almost imagine the "blue-sky thinking" session which went on when the Tories chose the location for their manifesto launch.
"What's it all about?"
"Well there's 'change' and 'We're all in this together'."
"What about a unisex changing room…?" suggests a young chap who is immediately sent out to get the slim lattes.
"Well, there's 'power to the people'."
"What about a power station?"
"Yes, brilliant! What about Battersea Power station? It's a great British landmark ripe for regeneration just like Britain under Labour."
"Yes, fire up the power station. It's time for change."
David Cameron noted: "We're all in this together."
This comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDeleteA walk along the South Bank of the Thames offers, among its various other entertainments, a form of reverse time travel in which old amenities such as Shakespeare’s Globe, Sir Francis Drake’s Golden Hind and the Clink Prison are spanking new, but Sir Giles Gilbert Scott’s 1930s power station, the largest brick building in Europe, is so decrepit that its chimneys are at significant risk of falling down.
ReplyDeleteIt’s a bizarre place to have chosen as a significant backdrop for an electoral pitch. And maybe that’s the point. The power station is in a marginal constituency, very near the top of the Tories’ target list.
I spoke to a Labour activist who’s campaigned in the area for 25 years, and he says of Battersea that ‘it’s a Tory seat now,’ meaning that the demographic changes, especially the ones linked to the property market, have moved the seat back to the Tories, who lost it in 1997. But they still have to win it, and they have also to win the considerable number of other South London marginal seats, many of whose residents are very familiar with the sad story of the Power Station and the evident failure it represents.