A daft pledge
It's Lib/Dem conference this week.
Earlier today the Liberal Democrats tweeted a promise to every teenager in the country “that we will do everything we can to ensure you receive the opportunities we had in the 1970s”
Really?
I was a teenager in the 1970's.
Opportunities to enjoy power cuts, the dead unburied, rubbish lying in the streets?
Opportunity to have your healthcare disrupted by industrial action and far worse cuts in NHS spending imposed by the International Monetary Fund thanks to the incompetence of a Labour government than anything which ever happened to the NHS under a Conservative government?
My father was one of those affected - he was phoned on the day he was due to go into Guys hospital for a heart operation that doctors thought was medically urgent, and informed that his operation had been cancelled because show stewards representing porters and cleaners had decided that they knew better than the doctors what an emergency was.
Or perhaps they meant opportunities for learning? They want to offer the educational opportunities which were available to teenagers at a time when there was a two tier system of higher education, in which only about 6% of my age cohort went to the top tier (universities) and fewer than ten percent had the opportunity for any higher education? (It's currently about 50%)
Back to the sixties is not a positive message and whoever wrote that tweet showed a lack of knowledge of history.
It appears to have been a misquote from a speech by Christine Jardine MP at the conference, except that when you listen to the clip she actually says "that you have the opportunities that we've enjoyed since the 1970's."
A much less daft pledge, but if you think about it, a very unambitious one. "We're not going to take away any opportunities which have been in place for the last forty years" is not much of a target.
Earlier today the Liberal Democrats tweeted a promise to every teenager in the country “that we will do everything we can to ensure you receive the opportunities we had in the 1970s”
Really?
I was a teenager in the 1970's.
Opportunities to enjoy power cuts, the dead unburied, rubbish lying in the streets?
Opportunity to have your healthcare disrupted by industrial action and far worse cuts in NHS spending imposed by the International Monetary Fund thanks to the incompetence of a Labour government than anything which ever happened to the NHS under a Conservative government?
My father was one of those affected - he was phoned on the day he was due to go into Guys hospital for a heart operation that doctors thought was medically urgent, and informed that his operation had been cancelled because show stewards representing porters and cleaners had decided that they knew better than the doctors what an emergency was.
Or perhaps they meant opportunities for learning? They want to offer the educational opportunities which were available to teenagers at a time when there was a two tier system of higher education, in which only about 6% of my age cohort went to the top tier (universities) and fewer than ten percent had the opportunity for any higher education? (It's currently about 50%)
Back to the sixties is not a positive message and whoever wrote that tweet showed a lack of knowledge of history.
It appears to have been a misquote from a speech by Christine Jardine MP at the conference, except that when you listen to the clip she actually says "that you have the opportunities that we've enjoyed since the 1970's."
A much less daft pledge, but if you think about it, a very unambitious one. "We're not going to take away any opportunities which have been in place for the last forty years" is not much of a target.
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