Home » Posts tagged 'Labour blog' (Page 3)
Tag Archives: Labour blog
'The hashtag in political campaigning' by Fat Councillor
Dear ‘the Left’
Please, please, please save us from your constant hashtag campaigns. We know that you are angry at the actions of the LibCon coalition. We also know that you are just as angry that the LibDems agreed to enter a coalition with the conservatives.
However, in your fury, you seem to be blind to the fact that the electorate rather like the coalition. Their combined polling has consistently outstripped support for the Labour party. Shouting about manifesto commitments has no effect. And, the reason for this, in my view, is that the electorate understood before the election that no political party was telling the truth about the state of the UK’s economy, or what actions would be needed in order to rectify the problem. The cuts argument is lost for the time being.
Cuts bring me to hashtags. I make the presumption that you know what I am referring to, but if not, here is an explanation.
Since the election, we have ‘enjoyed’ a plethora of Twitter hashtag campaigns, such as #savenhsdirect #sackcoulson #saveourforests and #ukuncut. Not one of these campaigns have amounted to anything. The electorate have shrugged their shoulders and said ‘so what?’ The reason is, to my mind, pretty clear.
The electorate (and by that, I mean the great masses of the population who are not politically active) simply do not care. Perhaps that is a harsh conclusion, but you must understand that the electorate currently view everything through the prism of the cuts argument. That argument has been accepted, and to deny that is to doom your campaigns to failure.
The Left need to stop launching campaigns at the drop of a hat. The more campaigns they launch which lead to nothing, the more devalued these campaigns become. I may be wrong, but I get the distinct feeling that the plethora of campaigns are merely cover for activists continued fury at being out of power. Get over your sense of entitlement.
Instead, activists need to bide their time and understand that at some point, perhaps in three or six months, the coalition will do something that the electorate fundamentally disagree with. That will be the time to launch a campaign. And, managed correctly, with a reasoned and reasonable alternative, the campaign can succeed.
But in the meantime, please, please, please save us from your constant hashtag campaigns.
Sincerely
The Fat Councillor
Fat Councillor is regularly on Twitter, and is neither a Fat nor a Councillor
The comprehensive spending review, it's simples…
Last week, I asked a London cabbie why he voted Tory. All of them are not voting for Ken Livingstone, but it’s an entirely different matter altogether why some of them don’t trust Labour with the economy.
At the heart of many of such people’s criticisms is the idea is that the state is overinflated, spending on it ballooned out of proportion especially in management, and that we did not invest when we could have afforded it. This ‘we didn’t mend the roof while the sun was shining’ may seem at face value entirely sensible, but I would argue that we should not set fire to the whole house as the roof is not right.
The real issue is that we need to get the deficit down without endangering the recovery, and central to that is not adopting a strategy which the Institute of Fiscal Studies and Confederation of Small Businesses have described as unfair. Norman Lamount said famously that unemployment is a price well-worth-paying, and the Labour current policy recognises that growth and jobs are central to our economic strategy – not a side issue.
It is often said that the general public should not be underestimated, but I wonder how many people genuinely stop to think about this in actuality. All parties need to treat the public as intelligent enough to understand that bringing the world economy back from the brink of catastrophe is not the same as paying off a credit card bill. ?For example, there are only very few companies who have a AAA* rating which are about to go ‘bankrupt’. George Osborne by claiming that Britain is about to go bankrupt is making a legal representation potentially – whether this misrepresentation is fraudulent, negligent or innocent, I’ll leave entirely up to you.
There has to be cuts but without growth, attempts to cut the deficit will be self defeating. ?A rising dole queue means a bigger welfare bill, and less tax revenue coming in. ?Perplexingly whilst the Government introduces a ‘bonfire of the QUANGOs’, the Government’s newest quango – the Office for Budget Responsibility – says that the coalition’s approach will cost jobs, and that those job losses will cost the taxpayer £700m in Jobseekers Allowance claims alone. ?The reputable management consultancy firm ?Price Waterhouse Coopers are forecasting that a million jobs will go as austerity takes its toll – half of them in the private sector.
The Conservative Party did not win the election, despite Labour losing it. They have no mandate for this policy, and the Liberal Democrats, for supporting this, through Nick Clegg will in 2015 or earlier be consigned to history.
Dr Shibley Rahman is a research physician and research lawyer by training.
Queen’s Scholar, BA (1st.), MA, MB, BChir, PhD, MRCP(UK), LLB(Hons.), FRSA
Director of Law and Medicine Limited
Member of the Fabian Society and Associate of the Institute of Directors
Plus ça change (plus c'est la même chose)
@DAaronovitch directly challenged me as to what I felt was good at Ed’s first ever PMQs. Aaronovitch made the faultless remark that it was the same format; it was business as usual, and just an exchange of quotations and facts, and there had been indeed plus ça change (plus c’est la même chose). I can only only bow to David’s authoritative commentary on this, which, on further reflection, has always been very perceptive to me.
I was struck by the measured unpredictability of Ed Miliband. Firstly, he wrong-footed most of the punters with his choice of shadow cabinet, then he went with child benefit, when most political spectators thought he’d run with the graduate tax, which was left up to the lack-lustre Esther McVey to ask about later in the proceedings. However, the overwhelming verdict from my Labour tweeps that Ed floored David in this first exchange. Ed started with a very straight-forward question.
“How many families where 1 parent stays at home will be affected?
“15% of families are higher-rate tax-payers“. This was a total answer, and then David asked a question.
Ed reasonably replies: “I may be new to this game, but I’m afraid I ask the questions and he answers them” Ed then asks why the formulation of the system is not fair, and again David did not give an answer to it.
“I’m afraid it’s 0 out of 2 on straight answers. We must change the tone of these exchanges, but we must provide straight questions to straight answers“.
The Speaker then asked for calm in the house, but it seems that many people watching the spectacle do in fact enjoy the exchanges; they seem particularly like the new passive aggressive stance by Ed Miliband, while David Cameron was shouting and ranting his head off.
David then came up with his beleaguered, “It’s Labour’s Fault”. Only Nick Clegg seemed to find that convincing. Then he moved onto an antiquated quotation from Alan Milburn, and said, “I love this”, like a third-rate imitation of Margaret Thatcher. The problem is that not many on the Coalition’s side ‘loved it'; they just saw a leader of thee Tory party sinking without trace. Ed Miliband then returned to the point that he simply did not believe his budget reduction plan was at all fair, and again David Cameron gave a really poor performance.
It’s no surprise that all the commentators thought that David Cameron was easily beaten in this first performance, including @TimMontgomerie.
Dr Shibley Rahman
Queen’s Scholar, BA (1st.), MA, MB, BChir, PhD, MRCP(UK), LLB(Hons.), FRSA
Director of Law and Medicine Limited
Member of the Fabian Society and Associate of the Institute of Directors
