Ah, Labour. The party that never met a taxpayer pound it didn’t immediately want to throw into the flaming skip of bureaucratic self-love.
And now, in their latest masterstroke of fiscal frivolity, they’ve handed more than £500,000 – yes, HALF A MILLION of YOUR hard-earned, inflation-squeezed, council-tax-crushed pounds – to an ad agency to change a dot.
A dot.
That’s it.
Up a bit and from black to turquoise.
Bravo, comrades. Truly revolutionary.
The no-nonsense masthead of the gov.uk website, the portal through which the good people of Britain renew passports, pay taxes, and occasionally rage-scream about DVLA delays, has now been mauled in a “brand refresh” so limp, so laughable, it would make a GCSE graphics student blush.
Gone is the crisp black header. In its place? Blue. The dot? Now turquoise — presumably to signify the deep, watery hole Labour is digging into the nation’s pockets. This, dear friends, is what £532,000 gets you under Labour: a half-arsed rebrand that looks like someone spilled mouthwash on a Word document.
Let us be clear: this isn’t a website relaunch. This isn’t a digital revolution. This is optical nonsense, a stylistic sugar puff, a makeover for the Ministry of Vanity… which YOU pay for.
“Did someone really get paid to move a dot?” asked one civil servant online.
Yes. And not just paid. Lavishly. Possibly with an oat milk latte in one hand and a diversity impact assessment in the other.
This, mind you, is the same Labour mentality that presides over councils unable to patch a leaking roof for a pensioner in a crumbling flat — but somehow finds tens of thousands for rainbow-coloured zebra crossings, ‘inclusion officers’ with clipboards, and now, a turquoise dot that no one asked for.
What’s next? Spending £3 million to swap “gov.uk” for “we.gov.luv.u”? Shall we expect a £200k PowerPoint about moving the apostrophe in “citizen’s portal”? Meanwhile, potholes multiply like rabbits on Viagra, and bins remain uncollected for so long they qualify for permanent residency.
Oh, and let’s not forget the money was “drawn from existing departmental budgets.” Translated from the language of mandarins, that means: “We cut a library here, a nurse there, and voilà! Blue dots for all!”
Make no mistake: this isn’t just a dot. This is the full stop on common sense in public spending. A glowing, aqua-coloured warning sign that Labour, whether in Westminster or your local council, cannot be trusted with a budget any more than a toddler can be trusted with a hammer and a Ming vase.
Labour’s motto might as well be: “If it ain’t broke, spend half a million breaking it in the name of ‘refreshed branding’.”
In the real world, if your website needs a redesign, you call a freelancer from Fiverr and they knock it out for £500 and a Greggs voucher. Only in Labourland does this process balloon into a Saatchi-powered design spa retreat for fonts and favicon adjustments.
Taxpayers should be fuming. Not just because they’ve been robbed, but because they’ve been mocked. Mocked by a political class that thinks “dot movement” is worth more than your streetlight, your school budget, your GP appointment.
So next time Labour tells you they’re “prioritising frontline services,” just remember: the only front line they care about is the one on a mood board in a W1 branding meeting. And on that line? A tiny turquoise dot.
£532,000 for a logo tweak.
Not so much a brand refresh as a brain flush.
God help us all.
Worth reading the story in full here: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-14835905/Government-blows-half-million-vanity-makeover-website-stop.html
