I'd read originally this morning that the Labour Party Manifesto (the Red Book), wasn't available as a pdf, but just a moment looking on the web site and there it was. Or rather, here it is.

You will need to be patient in getting it though, it took a few minutes for me, no doubt just the hundreds of thousands of people eager to read it. Or perhaps its just all the bloggers.

I can say one thing for certain and that's that it wasn't published for those with an eyesight the far side of 40 years old. I needed to crank up the magnification in Acrobat to 150% to read it comfortably, something a little harder to do with a physical book, but then many with eyesight problems aren't going to be reading it online either.

Blair's blurb at the beginning sounds as if it might come out of any major corporations Annual Report, all bright eyed and bushy tailed.

Moving on into the detail and we get some of the aspirations. On Employment."Our goal is employment opportunity for all - the modern definition of
full employment." Yes, not an actual job just the opportunity for a job. On a day when the unemployment figures went up by 20,000 (let alone Rover and the Longbridge area), which means the overal total topped a million and a half this doesn't seem such a wonderful aspiration.

And Education (Our Number 1 Priority, can't help thinking about United Airlines every time I see that), the aspiration is to "We want
every secondary school to become a specialist school and existing specialist
schools will be able to take on a second specialism. Over time all
specialist schools will become extended schools, with full programmes
of after-school activities."

Now, perhaps I'm just being a little dim but if every school is a specialist and every school should have more than one specialism doesn't that mean they're generalist? I have to be honest the whole idea of school specialisms leaves me cold and with the feeling that if there's a speciality over there then there is a lack of opportunity and provision over here.

All in all Labour seem to have dropped actual promises in favour of aspirations. This might be more honest, but it also means they can say, "But that's what we tried to accomplish we didn't say we would".