Mennear's Mailing

Through the letterbox a sheaf of bluish bumph cascades. "Mennear's Mailing", the heading reads, next to the Torch of Destiny logo which the Conservatives took over when British Telecom were finished with it. Mennear is a grinning thing in a suit whose first name is Andrew. Mennear's Mailing is an excrescence of Finchley and Golders Green Conservatives.

In deference to the presumed stupidity of an audience which is expected to take seriously the "Are you thinking what we're thinking?" poster campaign, Mennear's Mailing provides me with a list headed "Conservative ACTION in ten words". The word ACTION is in the kind of red whose socialist connotations might easily scare off a New Labourite, and the ten words bear a suspicious resemblance to Tony Blair's minimalist election soundbites for today's monosyllabic elector.

Conservative ACTION in ten words:

More Police
Cleaner Hospitals
Lower Taxes
School Discipline
Controlled Immigration

"Plus," on the side, "one more: Accountability". So, then - Conservative ACTION in ten words, plus one more word, making in all eleven words, only one of which is a verb, i.e. an action. Doubtless it is this flexible attitude to numbers and semantics which has made Conservative fiscal policy, i.e. New Labour fiscal policy, so attractive to the business community.

The reason why we need more police and more expulsions from our schools ("discipline") is spelled out in the main headline to Mennear's Mailing, which I here reproduce with some necessary typographical alleviation: "Blair: Soft on Crime, Even Softer on the Causes of Crime".

Now, please don't make the mistake I made; don't get your hopes up. Mennear's Mailing is not talking about war crimes, and Iraq is not mentioned. The sitting Labour MP is, in any case, an opponent of the Iraq adventure, and has been from its inception; apparently even the Conservatives realise that turning this against him might be a bit of an uphill struggle. Or perhaps they're saving the issue for a later Mennear's Mailing.

The causes of crime, it appears, are the 24-hour drinking binges which are about to become compulsory and all-pervasive under Tony Blair. In order to counter the awful consequences of such indiscipline, "a Conservative Government would provide 40,000 more police officers, set up 25,000 new hard drug rehabilitation places to give young abusers a real choice and restore school discipline to schools by replacing the 4,000 places available in pupil referral units today with 25,000 places at new 'Turnaround Schools'."

I'm confused already. Give young abusers a real choice of jails? Restore school discipline to schools as opposed to massage parlours? Are you thinking what I'm thinking?

The other side of Mennear's Mailing includes another prominent red bit about "New Labour waste". The reference to waste is not about anything trivial, like lives in Iraq; it refers to excessive expenditure on pot plants by the Department of Trade and Industry and the Northern Ireland Office. The DTI has spent a whopping hundred and twenty-one thousand and more on potted plants since 2001. The Northern Ireland Office spent nearly twenty-five thousand on plants in 2004-5 alone. Meanwhile, "families are paying five thousand pounds more a year in tax but 5,000 people are dying each year from infections caught in hospitals and there are still over a million people waiting for treatment."

Gosh. So it takes five families a year of excess taxation to pay for potted plants at the Northern Ireland Office, while for every pound of excess taxation exacted annually from said families, one person a year dies from a hospital infection. Statistics are so dashed poetic sometimes.

There's a blue bit about exempting first homes from inheritance tax, which is mentioned regularly to Andrew when he is out canvassing, he says. There is another bit, less blue than the other bit but still jolly blue, headed "Labour campaign poster is tasteless and wrong", about the "Pigs Might Fly" poster which Labour meekly withdrew some weeks ago. Andrew is "shocked that the Labour party finds it remotely clever or amusing" to superimpose on flying pigs the faces of a prominent criminal from a family of asylum seekers and his friend from another planet.

I wonder what Andrew's opinion might be of the Conservative posters about a threatened epidemic of blokes on early release assaulting people's daughters. There is a white bit with a blue heading, "Feedback to Andrew Mennear," (yes, the heading has a comma at the end; no, there is no reason for this), but somehow I don't find myself wondering enough to ask him.