Opinions from a loyal Labour Party member
Social Media
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.
Labour manifesto launch
Apr 12th
Labour’s manifesto launch is a bit different to what a lot of people were expecting. Usually general election manifestos are only bought and read by real political junkies*. But the problem with that is that most people just see what the media chooses to report, they don’t actually get to see the real policies free if media spin and distortion.
Labour’s innovation is to provide the manifesto in a multitude of different formats to suit a wide variety of needs. The most innovative is the film produced by Ridley Scott Associates and Saatchi & Saatchi which is ideal for sharing with friends and family. In just two minutes it gives people a real insight into Labour’s policy pledges in its manifesto.
For those who want more detail you can click through and see a series of other films on specific policy areas such as the economy and health. You can also click through to download PDFs of the actual manifesto. It’s in the PDFs that you get the policy detail that highlights how solid, serious and substantial Labour’s manifesto actually is. Douglas Alexander explained that the rationale behind the animated films was to allow voters to “paddle, swim and dive” into Labour’s manifesto.
Labour’s launch is about putting members and voters at the forefront. Before 1997 Peter Mandelson used to talk about winning the ‘air war’ and the ‘ground war’. The air war was the mainstream media, the ground war was pounding the streets talking to voters. Today it’s even more about the ground war. Except the ground war isn’t just on the streets, it’s online with voters and local party activists talking to each other.
In contrast to the Tories negative advertising campaigns Labour has deliberately chosen a positive theme, reflecting bright sunshine coming up over the horizon and a family looking forward to a future fair for all.
The creative manifesto isn’t just creative for the sake of it, but is also designed to reflect the importance of the creative and digital sector to the UK economy.
That’s why Labour isn’t relying on the broadcast and print media for the manifesto launch. The launch wasn’t introduced by a cabinet minister, but by Labour blogger Ellie Gellard. At the same time Labour is sharing the links to the films with party members so they can share them directly with friends, colleagues and family through email, social media and social networks.
Impressed as I am by Labour’s innovation and as new media as I am, I have to confess I’m disappointed that I won’t be walking down to WH Smith to buy all of the manifestos. Keeping an online video or PDF just isn’t the same.
DISCLOSURE: I did have a sneak preview of the manifesto.
* I used to have a collection of manifestos going back to 1979 which was the first election where I was really aware of and interested in politics (I was nearly 11).
XP: Also posted on A PR Guy’s Musings.
Twitter ban by Lord Mayor of Leeds
Feb 24th
Leeds is a dynamic European city with a thriving digital and creative sector, unfortunately it’s not one that the Lord Mayor of Leeds appears to understand.
John Barron, the blogger responsible for the excellent new Guardian Leeds, tweeted “at #leedscouncil meeting no tweets allowed, says lord mayor.”
If this is true then Leeds City Council has joined the list of clueless councils that are damaging democracy by failing to engage with the electorate to the best of their ability.
When I was a Leeds councillor one of my frustrations was how it holds nearly all of its official meetings during ‘normal’ working hours thus depriving the vast majority of the electorate an opportunity to participate. There’s never a perfect time to hold meetings, but during the working day is done for the convenience of officers and councillors, not the public.
Enabling councillors to blog and tweet from official meetings actually makes them far more accessible to voters. If MPs can blog in the House of Commons – and many of them do – then Leeds councillors should be able to as well.
The worst of this is that Leeds can justifiably claim to have been at the forefront of councillors using social media. In 2003 I was the first councillor in the UK to blog (as covered by The Guardian at the time.) In July 2003 I even blogged live from the council chamber, which who knows but might even have been a world first.
It’s disgraceful that in February 2010 the Lord Mayor has chosen to take Leeds back into the past.
I’m inviting Councillor Judith Elliot of the Morley Borough Independents to use the comments to explain why she wants to deny the citizens of Leeds the right to hear direct from their elected representatives. I’m waiting Judith.
Yorkshire Labour Party members on Twitter
Feb 7th
After this afternoon’s excellent Go Fourth Leeds Tweet Up I’ve pulled together a quick public list on Twitter of Yorkshire Labour Party members. It has only got 33 people on it at the moment, so apologies if I’ve missed you off. To get added just tweet to @stuartbruce or leave a comment on this blog.
You can follow the list here and thanks to @johnprescott for organising it all.
Official Conservative policy – Tory candidates not to be trusted
Feb 6th
It’s official you can’t trust Tory party candidates. The Conservative Party has so little faith in its own Parliamentary candidates that it’s had to issue official advice to candidates to check before they say anything about policy. Tory wanna-be MPs can’t Twitter, blog or use Facebook to talk about policy without checking first.
When I read and tweeted about the Daily Mail Fail story this morning I didn’t quite believe it. But confirmation came shortly later when Tory staffer Craig Elder tweeted “PPCs are free (and encouraged) to tweet what they like. But they should double-check if commenting about national policy.”
This ‘rebuttal’ is even more alarming than the original Daily Mail story. It effectively confirms that Tory candidates can’t be trusted to know something as simple as their own party’s policy! Now I know Dave and Boy George keep having gaffes and making it up on the hoof, but you’d have thought that Tory candidates would be bright enough to keep up on their own without spoon feeding from Central Office. Or maybe it’s just that the real views of Tory candidates are so much to the raving right that Dave is worried that voters might find out what they’re really like before the the election and scupper his chances for power.
You don’t need to look far to see some of the most extreme raving right nonsense to emanate from Dave’s acolytes:
This is going to be the most unpopular blog I’ve ever written, but here goes. MPs should set their own salaries. They should be free – encouraged, even – to take on additional jobs. And the fuss about how much they can spend on their kitchens is silly and demeaning.”
Daniel Hannan, Daily Telegraph blog, 16 May 2008
You just need contrast the Tory’s ‘Command and Control’ model with Labour’s approach of genuine engagement with voters to see that Cameron’s cuddly Conservatives are all spin and no substance.
David Cameron: because I’m worth it
Jan 7th
Listening to David Cameron on the Today programme this morning I heard him as good as admit that he’d been airbrushed by dodging the question and blaming those who produced the advert.
It’s not exactly the sign of a great leader that at the first time of trouble you blame the troops.
And another hat-tip to John Prescott and Go Fourth for this brilliant spoof advert (now picked up as a story by Gemma Charles in Marketing magazine).
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.
