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Mandelson punches gibbon

Not really, it’s the KTAB manifesto-fest

The battle for Britain has kicked off and the lines have been drawn as election fever takes off across the country in a wave of mixed metaphors and manifestos. Get the low-down on the documents at the heart of this three-horse race for the light at the end of recession with KTAB’s in-depth analysis.

Labour

Sunshine! Flowers! Family! Love! Bunnies! Trade Unions!

Labour’s manifesto cover looks like a camp Soviet propaganda poster. The family—consisting of socialist mum, Tory dad, and UKIP children (‘Mummy, mummy, why are banana shapes and metric standardisation legislated from Bwussels?’)—looks out into the bright sunrise of budget cuts and higher taxes, blissfully unaware of the extraordinary rendition gulags for ASBO-violators hidden just behind the horizon, pink with smoggy haze from the third runway at Heathrow.

The inside of the manifesto was little more realistic, offering punters ‘two megabyte per second’ Internet access by 2012—enough to pirate the entire Digital Economy Bill fifteen times before having your connection cut off by an over-zealous music industry executive.

Download the Labour manifesto (PDF, 2.3 MiB)

Conservatives

lampoon Conservative party 2010 manifesto cover

The low-res version (above), or download the high-res version (3.2 GiB)

At the launch of the tediously blue Conservative manifesto, party leader David Cameron said he would make Britain ‘better’ with ‘more opportunities’ for ‘empty soundbites’ and ‘alliteration, subjective adjectives and generic-sounding positive intransitive verbs’.

‘This is a manifesto for a new kind of politics,’ he told a press conference, channeling brand-new ideas from Mill’s On Liberty (1859), ‘People power, not state power. Big society, not big government. Meaningless platitudes, not broken promises.’

The Conservatives have successfully lost the graphic design vote by making an entire manifesto which, despite being written in terminally uninspiring Times New Roman, still manages to be a whopping 77 MiB—so large you’d need one of Labour’s insane broadband connections to download it before the election.

Liberal Democrats

satirical Liberal Democrat party 2010 manifesto cover

People like Helvetica.

The Liberal Democrats’ manifesto has all the pizzaz of a list of swimming times at your local pool, or an advice leaflet about sexual health.

Having plagiarised the other two parties’ slogans to create the lumpiest election soundbite ever—‘Vote for change: a future fair for all’…sorry, no, that actually is the other two parties’ slogans…‘Change that works for you: building a fairer Britain’—minimal work was required for the televised debates.

‘What he said,’ Nick Clegg riposted, ‘And also what he said. But different, and with a real chance for change you can believe in.

‘People like voting,’ he added.