Personal
Seven years today since my first blog
Apr 24th
It was seven years ago today (on April 24, 2003) when I started my first blog. Little did I know at the time what an amazing effect it would have on my life and career.
If I hadn’t started that blog I might never have started Wolfstar. It would be great to be able to say that I started the blog because of my amazing intuition and foresight. But unfortunately it wouldn’t be true.
In truth it was probably laziness that made me start the blog. From 1998 to 2005 I was a elected local councillor on Leeds City Council. When I was first elected as a councillor I did something that was extremely unusual at the time and started a councillor website. As I’m not a professional designer or coder this was actually quite hard work and if I’m honest wasn’t particularly brilliant.
That’s why when I first came across ‘blogging’ I was intrigued as I thought, that sounds a lot easier than running my website. And so my first blog was born. It was the first councillor blog in the UK and the third political blog – former Lib Dem MP Richard Allan (now European Head of Public Policy for Facebook) and Labour MP Tom Watson were first and second respectively.
It didn’t take long for The Guardian to find my blog and in July 2003 it ran a profile about the UK’s first blogging councillor. As The Guardian article indicates my councillor blog deliberately wasn’t like many of today’s political blogs. It was determinedly focused on local issues that mattered to people in Leeds and more specifically my ward of Middleton (later Middleton Park) in south Leeds.
But my blog wasn’t just about the minutia of being a local councillor. That sort of the thing is for officers. You can’t run a good councillor blog without being political. It was when I was being highly political about local issues that my blog always received the most attention and engagement. Despite popular belief local politics is party political. That’s one of the problems with many of the official efforts to get councillors blogging. Because they are official they have to be a politics free zone (otherwise the local authority would be accused of funding party political campaigning). But you can’t take the politics out of it. Even seemingly mundane decisions such as when the road sweepers visit can actually be highly political (the Tories want the leafy suburbs to be pristine and don’t care about the council estates).
The other important thing I learnt from my councillor blog was the massive impact what you do online can have on what happens offline. The intention of my councillor blog was never to get all 16,000 of the local electors to read it. What I did want (and succeeded in) was to get local ‘influencers’ to read it. If they knew properly about what I was doing then they could talk face to face to other people in the community. That’s why I was pleased that people like the chairs and secretaries of residents associations read it, the local vicar read it, the local neighbourhood policing team read it (and even asked me to write about them!) All these people then went out and spread the word for me.
The success of my councillor blog meant that it didn’t take long before it dawned on me that blogs weren’t just about making my life easier, but also had enormous potential for my day job as a public relations consultant… but that’s a story for another blog post.
Cross-posted to A PR Guy’s Musings: Stuart Bruce, my professional blog.
Healthcare reform – Amazing time to be in the USA
Mar 22nd
In October 2008 we had a family holiday in Philadelphia and spent a fair bit of time campaigning on the doorsteps for Barack Obama. It was an amazing experience and I spoke to many voters who would probably have abstained saying “they’re all the same”. The killer converter message was healthcare reform. That’s why it so great now to be in New York at the same time as healthcare reform is finally going through.
That’s why I do politics. It matters to peoples lives. It’s not the words of the Republicans/Tories that hurt, it’s their policies which would catastrophically cripple the lives of millions of working people in the USA and UK. Savour and rejoice in the latest email from Barack Obama:
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Stuart —
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Stuart Bruce at 17 in the top 100 political bloggers in the UK list
Jan 12th
Just spotted this list of the top 100 political blogging tweeters in the UK. I make it into the top 20 at 17, just behind the Evening Standard’s Paul Waugh, ConservativeHome’s Tom Montgomerie and Labour MP Tom Harris.
The full top 20 is:
1) Alastair Campbell (12,270 followers)
2) John Prescott (10,717 followers)
3) Iain Dale (6,993 followers)
4) Tom Watson MP (6,977 followers)
5) Guido Fawkes (6,300 followers)
6) The Wardman Wire (5,698 followers)
7) Kerry McCarthy (4,451 followers)
UK Progressive (4,399 followers)
9) James Cleverly (3,600 followers)
10) Enemies of Reason (3,412 followers)
11) Cllr Phil Briscoe (3,342 followers)
12) Green Girls Global (3,101 followers)
13) Labour List (2,991 followers)
14) Paul Waugh (2,972 followers)
15) Tim Montgomerie (2,968 followers)
16) Tom Harris MP (2,637 followers)
17) Stuart Bruce (2,628 followers)
18) Gideon Rachman (2,240 followers)
19) Obnoxio the Clown (2,147 followers)
20) Lynne Featherstone MP (2,058 followers)
Gordon Brown must not go V2
Jan 6th
The second post on this new blog said Gordon must not go.
This evening I’m on BBC Radio 5’s Matthew Bannister show. To give you a heads up on where I’ll be coming from I’ve just added my name to this letter from LabourList:
We are dismayed that Labour’s positive start to the New Year has been overshadowed after only two days by veteran Labour MPs who should know better. As candidates and activists, we know that nothing turns the public off more than introverted infighting in the corridors of Westminster and we hope that this distraction fizzles out as quickly as it started. Whether Labour wins or loses the next election will rest on whether we have the right answers for the challenges of the next decade and the right approach to politics.
This new approach has to recognise that there can be no return to the old style of politics after the next election. The public, rightly, have lost the last vestiges of faith in the political class after the expenses scandal, and the only way we can win it back is if the Labour Party tries to do things differently from the usual political cribsheet. We must not resort to negative attacks on the basis of class war. What matters is not the school someone went to, but whether they can understand the hopes and needs of all our people and are able to govern in the greater interests of our nation. It means that Labour must be willing to accept not everything it has done in government has been perfect, but that it’s ready to learn from its mistakes. And it means that we must go to polls on the boldest, most progressive platform we can muster. This is not a time for triangulation or cheap dividing lines. It’s a time for clarity of vision and ambition.
As the grassroots of the Labour Party we don’t doubt that the next four months will be difficult, but part of being a progressive is to maintain hope that nothing is insurmountable. We believe that an authentically Labour manifesto combined with our significant achievements in government and our passion for organising could bring about a historic fourth term. We call on Labour’s leadership in parliament, in government and in Downing Street to focus on bringing about a better future for the people of Britain.
Stuart Bruce
The Tax Payers Alliance doesn’t represent me
Jan 5th
I don’t understand why the media given any credence whatsoever to the so called Tax Payers Alliance. The idea that it anyway represents ordinary tax payers like you and me is ridiculous. It represents a narrow sectarian interest of rich people who don’t have a patriotic bone in their bodies.
The vast majority of people in this country understand that you pay tax in order to fund essential public services such as the NHS, education and the defence of the nation. Every tax payer is a recipient of services that are paid for by tax. Britain is a democracy and we vote to elect a government that represents our interests. We don’t need an unelected, shadily funded, unaccountable pressure group pretending to defend our interests.
A real Tax Payers Alliance would represent ordinary tax payers who also benefit from the essential services the state provides. A real Tax Payers Alliance wouldn’t necessarily stand for “lower taxes” it would stand for fairer taxes.
John Prescott’s Go Fourth campaign deserves praise for exposing the TPA as a partisan pressure group rather than a legitimate think tank or support group. He did well with the Charity Commission investigation and the response from the BBC that acknowledges:
"I do accept that the TPA’s publications and policies come from a distinctive political position and think we should try to avoid our output giving the impression that it is an impartial body.
New decade, new year, new blog
Dec 31st
In March 2003 I became the first councillor in the UK to start a blog. That blog is now defunct, as it was very definitely a ‘councillor blog’ and not about national politics (as The Guardian made clear in Blogging for better bins). When I stood down as a councillor I let that blog die as I concentrated on my professional b usiness blog at A PR Guy’s Musings. I frequently reference political issues on my business blog, but usually within a public relations or communications context.
As we enter an election year I’ve increasingly wanted to be more political in my blogging, but haven’t been able to on my business blog as it’s directed at a different audience. That’s why I’ve started this new blog where I can talk about lots of the issues that really matter.
Guido Fawkes blogs that The Online Left Thinks 2010 Will Be Their Year and disagrees. I’m inclined to agree with Guido as I don’t think that any of the left-wing blogs will knock the right-wing supremos off their pedestals. However, it isn’t all about the blockbuster blogs. They are only part of the picture, what’s going to also make a difference is the myriad of smaller blogs and thousands of individuals on Twitter, Facebook and other social media and social networking platforms.
Guido also says:
“The left has to get the post-election civil war out of the way first before it re-groups. Given that the online left is way to the left of the electorate, there is a good chance that the Labour blogosphere will help consign the Labour Party to irrelevance for a good while.”
Personally I’m not a great believer in the left/right divide in the Labour Party, but it’s unlikely that any of the tribalists that do would put me on the left of the Labour Party. That’s part of my motivation for starting this blog. I’ve got things to say and the old-fashioned, out-dated structure of the Party isn’t up to modern political discourse (there’s a subject for a future blog post).
Guido’s prediction of a post-election civil war in the Labour Party assumes that we’re heading for a massive electoral defeat, but that’s not what I believe. I’m still in it to win it. But win or lose, there is a need for a massive debate in the Labour Party and I want to be ready.
