Labour keeps up billboard pressure

The latest billboard by the Labour Party - erected sometime on Saturday - represents another direct attack at the PN's eyebrow-raising decision to heavily base a billboard design on the iconic UK Conservative Party's 1979 'Labour Isn't Working' billboard.

Located next to an existing Nationalist Party billboard, the Labour poster features a reproduction of the billboard's original 1979 version, captioned with the message 'GONZIPN: COPY & PASTE"

The PN billboard was criticised for being almost identical to the UK Conservative party's with the exception of two words.  After the campaign slant was announced by the PN on Friday, social media platforms such as Facebook and twitter came alive with users comparing the similarities between the two campaign posters.

While the Conservative Party ran with the slogan of 'Labour Isn't Working', a jibe at how unemployment stood at 700,000, the Nationalist Party's iteration claims that 'Labour Won't Work', presumably attempts to stoke non-specific fears among the population of the inefficacy of a Labour government.

This latest Labour instalment follows hot on the heels of a series of more posters which attempted to piggyback onto the PN's potentially counter-productive campaign slant. Labour's previous posters revolved around the theme of queues: queues for operations, for jobs, for benefits, which the Nationalist Government is purportedly responsible for.

The original UK Conservative Party 1979 billboard, the handiwork of advertising gurus Saatchi and Saatchi, came hot on the heels of a disastrous Labour government when unemployment in Britain was around a million - the billboard featured a long dole queue under a banner that read 'Unemployment Office'.

In the PN billboard unveiled on Friday, a long queue of people can also be seen, ostensibly denoting the reverse of Prime Minister Lawrence Gonzi's boast that he has 'created' 20,000 jobs in the last four years.