'Hey Chav'

More on the Labour Manifesto... I was hoping for a better title than "Britain - forward not back". It's a Milburnism, surely. It doesn't have the resonance of 1997's "New Labour - Because Britain Deserves Better". And there's no piccie of Blair on the cover. It is, in fact, Labour's Little Red Book (as the BBC point out.)

I was dearly hoping for the manifesto to be called "Hey Chav" - which I'm coining as a British version of Hunter S. Thompson's "Hey Rube". ("Hey Sucker" is a more accurate translation, but it's a Wham! lyric.) It would have been nice for Labour to go for the youth vote with Blair, and the Cabinet, in full Burberry regalia... maybe they could have had a barbeque back in March, when the weather was nicer. Jamie Oliver could have rustled up some kebabs for them, for only 55p a head. Tony could have reformed the Ugly Rumours and covered some Keane songs, or some such nonsense.

I still haven't quite gotten my head round what 'chav' means, but it's being used figuratively in this post anyway... to mean anyone who's obsessed with the surface, at the expense of anything deeper or less obvious meaning. Anybody who thinks a pledge not to raise basic or top income tax is a deep and fundamental economic policy decision. And anybody who believes what they read in election manifestos.