A recruiting drive disguised as a survey

We were hand delivered a letter from Ed Balls MP  on Saturday. It wasn’t hand delivered by Ed Balls, but presumably by a party activist, or as I like to call them- a useful idiot.

It was an otherwise plain windowed white envelope and inside were three items- a letter, a survey and a reply paid envelope.

The letter basically told us what a great guy Teddy Tickle was, how he worked very hard for his constituency and how he hoped to be our new MP come thenext general election some time within the next eighteen months. If you want to read it you can click on the images here on the right. Being a political party communication it includes an imprint, namely details of the printer and publisher. 

Now this stuff has to come out of Labour Party funds (as it is of course party political)  rather than MP Expenses but it doesn’t actually count towards the election spending (on which there are strict limits) as the election hasn’t been called yet even though it is obviously blatant electioneering.

I’ll look at the survey on another occasion but I was curious as to the reply envelope because it uses a system called Freepost Plus. Basically it is machine readable  and the important bit is the code at the end of the first line, the three groups of four letters with dashes, reminiscent of an extremely short Microsoft registration code.

There are two benefits to the customer for this over regular Freepost services- it is cheaper and it can be pre-printed onto envelopes proved the code is the right font and size. It is good for up to 100g only so all those Morleians thinking of putting a brick in a box and taping the envelope to it have been thwarted. (It is much less effort and just as expensive for him to send it back with nothing inside of course!)

Still, at 23p a household  that is £5k or so less Labour have to spend if they get 20,000 responses. As weight isn’t important you could even send it back empty…