This photo appeared on Facebook in the last few days. The poster the child is carrying is a lie. Has the Labour government closed down any of its own childrens’ centres? I don’t think so. It seems rather unnecessary to use a child to point out that a future Conservative government is going to be looking very hard at all areas of government expenditure.
We know who posted this photo. It was Gail Gallie. Her biog is posted on her own PR company’s website:
Gallie was the account director on BMP DDB’s 1997 New Labour election campaign, which helped bring Tony Blair to power, and later as a head of marketing at the BBC she led the launch campaigns for Cbeebies and BBC Three and strategic overhauls of the core BBC brand as well as Radio 1 and BBC News.
I wrote to Gallie to challenge her about who the kid was and she admitted that it was her own son. This seems very unwise to me and I will remove the photo as soon as she removes the one she posted on Facebook. In her mail Gallie said:
He’s my son, it is my photo, and I did it to support the campaign to keep Sure Start Centres open and available to people like me who use them.
This Facebook page is supposed to look all homespun but is in reality just an extension of Labour’s press release from yesterday that repeats their lie that the Tories will take £200 million out of Sure Start and close one fifth of the childrens’ centres. Even Channel 4’s Cathy Newman is not convinced and demolishes Labour’s lies quite satisfactorily here. The Tories will look at the effectiveness of Sure Start and refocus resources on the most needy. The evidence so far is that the money on Sure Start has not made a measurable difference to attainment, see here.
You can’t help thinking that the Tories are right to ask if the SureStart money couldn’t be better spent if high powered PR types like Gallie are hogging the places. If Gallie and her mates use up all the Sure Start places it will not be a surprise if the service does not reach the “hard to reach”. Doh!
Phil Taylor 
3 replies on “Would you use your child like this?”
Interestingly, if you leave a post on the wall – “Please don’t use your child on this campaign if you are from neither a modest nor middle income family” it get’s deleted. How nice, open and transparent.
For the record, am not too happy with ANY politician no matter what colour flag they wave. Indy’s all the way.
LikeLike
Typically Labour “chattering classes” stuff. Free perks for “those in the know”.
LikeLike
I have no idea what SureStart actually is, other than a costly branding exercise. The infant school I went to has been changed to a ‘SureStart Centre’. Does that mean it’s still a school or just some kind of outreach programme? Does it mean my family was poor without my realising it? Or perhaps I would now be too ‘rich’ for my children to attend? Is the teaching there now ‘dumbed down’ or improved?
Or is it just a logo outside the front gate that makes it look like the government is doing something positive?
In any if these cases the chances of it closing are surely approaching nil – it was a school before SureStart and it will be a school after SureStart… not that the Tory fools have any intention of cutting that programme, or at least they didn’t last time I heard Gove being questioned on the subject- they “fully support it”, whatever ‘it’ is.
LikeLike