28 November, 2003: Talk talk talk

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So, the Labour Party has launched its so-called Big Conversation. (As you'd expect, the website is pretty crummy.) It's not really obvious what this thing is about, since, as everyone has pointed out, Blair and colleagues have no intention of changing their policies. He doesn't, after all, have a reverse gear.

What's surprised me most about this is the number of people who have been fooled into describing it as being something to do with the government. A random selection from Google News:

The `Big Conversation' is nothing to do with the government. It's a Labour Party gimmick alone. (A real government consultation would be more subtly futile.)

Blair himself does his best to confuse the issue, of course, but deeply partisan nature of the survey and other stuff on the Big Conversation site does, at least, make things pretty clear in a way that the media and Labour's political opponents have somehow failed to.

I hope that nobody wastes too much time over it -- having written the above, I feel like I certainly have.


Copyright (c) 2003 Chris Lightfoot; available under a Creative Commons License.