It’s always tragic to see great, beloved institutions fall from grace. On the other hand, it’s tremendously jolly to watch farcical institutions like the Liberal Democrats belly-flop off the Bournemouth pier. Devoid of a coherent philosophy under the maladroit Nick Clegg, I asked almost two years ago on this site: what do the Lib Dems want to be when they grow up? After this year’s seaside side-show, I’ve realised my question took too much for granted.
Arriving on the south coast on the luxurious political sunbed of being able to propose absolutely anything (since there is no chance of it ever being implemented), this week’s Conference gave the Lib Dems carte-blanche for a glittering array of attractive promises. And so, Day One began with Nick Clegg telling his key voter-base – students – that he would no longer abolish their tuition fees (the logic presumably being: why keep a populist policy for which you will never have to bear the cost, when you could just ditch it for no political gain?) and the scintillating news that the Conference “backed plans to ban airbrushing in adverts targeted at children”.
Yes, you heard right. Jo Swinson MP commented that
“Women face pressure from all directions these days. Hit hard by the recession, trying to juggle family commitments with work and home life, and bombarded with adverts that contain completely unattainable images that no-one can live up to in real life.”
All very well, but this ban is apparently aimed at adverts facing the under-16s. So, just to be clear for any multi-tasking children under pressure from the recession, you might be running short of pocket money and fighting off negative equity on your doll’s houses, but at least when you open your next edition of Heat the adverts will only contain pictures of normally good-looking people that are not “completely unattainable”.
Feeling better? Probably not, because aside from being patronising, unenforceable and easy for clever glamour photographers to side-step, this ban also excludes from its imperious scope actual photoshoots and stories. So poor little cash-strapped Jemima does not have to face a “completely unattainable” image in the Burberry ad before the contents page, but she’s still got to endure 90 pages of photoshopped scantily-clad models in the features section!
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