Opinions from a loyal Labour Party member
Posts tagged Leeds
Seven years today since my first blog
757 days
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.
Twitter ban by Lord Mayor of Leeds
816 days
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
833 days
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.
“On the ground the yellow team are spiteful and vicious” Guido Fawkes
840 days
by Stuart Bruce
in Campaigning
The Liberal Democrats love to pretend that they are the fluffy, cuddly alternative to the nasty politics of the Tories and Labour. The truth, as any Labour or Conservative activist could tell you, is that the Lib Dems are usually the dirtiest, nastiest political campaigners around. They never usually trouble themselves with inconveniences such as facts or the truth.
Guido Fawkes reports that The Mirror’s Kevin Maguire has a delightful little tale about overhearing a Lib Dem activist on a train boasting on his mobile about he’d got the Evening Standard to claim Labour has secret plans to shut Kingston Hospital. Lib Dem MP Susan Kramer can now run a ‘successful’ campaign to save a hospital that we never going to close. It’s straight from the Lib Dem astro-turfing play book – whip up an artificial campaign and then claim the victory.
Guido Fawkes comments: “Once again it is another blow to the image of the Liberal Democrats as fluffy and nice that Clegg and Cowley Street constantly spin. On the ground the yellow team are spiteful and vicious.”
Let this be cautionary reminder for voters in the Leeds by-election for Hyde Park and Woodhouse. Labour has an exemplary candidate in Gerry Harper.
It still never ceases to amaze me how indiscrete people can be on train. This incident isn’t too dissimilar from the one I experienced in June when I overheard and Twittered the conversation of two Total executives discussing the Lindsey refinery dispute, which was then picked up and run by The Guardian.
UPDATE: According to Guido it appears that this wasn’t a rogue Lib Dem activist, but that Susan Kramer, the Lib Dem MP, was actively involved in this plot to mislead the electorate.