It's not exactly "yes we can"

There’s so much top-notch work coming out of the government comms teams these days that  it comes as a surprise to see them cock up something as straight-forward as a press conference backdrop.

The shot above shows a press conference earlier today:

• That could be a short essay behind the PM. It’s not exactly “yes we can”, is it?
• “Copenhagen” has been changed in to a mark, with a footprint  graphic too small to be clearly seen on screen. It doesn’t really add anything to my understanding, it’s just another message.
• The Copenhagen website address is obscured, and there’s a different address on the podium.

Sky News used less than ten seconds of this presser, and there were three too many things fighting for my attention. The end result is that minutes later, I can’t remember a word the PM said.

However, to be fair, looking closely at the photo above it was either a couple of roll-up stands, or the PM with a chandelier growing out of his head – sometimes you have to make the best of a bad lot!

The #Trafigura question #CarterRuck don't want you to see

Alarming news from the Guardian tonight who say that they have been banned from reporting the text of a Parliamentary Question, which is published on the parliament website, and covered by parliamentary privilege.

Lawyers Carter Ruck have secured an injunction which prevents the reporting of this written Question to the Secretary of State for Justice:

Paul Farrelly (Newcastle-under-Lyme): To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, what assessment he has made of the effectiveness of legislation to protect (a) whistleblowers and (b) press freedom following the injunctions obtained in the High Court by (i) Barclays and Freshfields solicitors on 19 March 2009 on the publication of internal Barclays reports documenting alleged tax avoidance schemes and (ii) Trafigura and Carter-Ruck solicitors on 11 September 2009 on the publication of the Minton report on the alleged dumping of toxic waste in the Ivory Coast, commissioned by Trafigura.

Carter Ruck are behaving like  a menace to democracy. If you have a twitter account please post a link to question 61 at http://bit.ly/cpIn5, using the hashtags #Trafigura and #CarterRuck.

Leave aside for the moment that trying to injunct information which has been published online is like trying to plug a seive one hole at a time, you may say ‘does it matter? Isn’t Parliament full of expenses fiddling crooks anyway?’ Well, yes it does matter… If any legal outfit is allowed to get away with obscuring or concealing the work of an elected Parliament from the people who elected it, then the potential consequences are far reaching and deeply serious for the politics of this country.

Carter Ruck have gone much too far in this ill-judged attempt to stand between people and Parliament. The injunction must be overturned, and if there’s a decent person anywhere at the top of that company, they’ll publicly apologise for their actions.

[PS I'm indebted to Steven Barnett for pointing me to the Wikileaks account of the Carter Ruck injunction, and for reminding me that there are still questions over the conduct of Barclays]

It’s time for the Liberal Democrats to devolve power to Nick Clegg

There was a curious anomaly in the otherwise excellent paper which launched conference, A Better Politics for Less. The paper proposed the merger of the Higher Education Funding Council for England (a body which does what it says on the tin) with the more obliquely titled Learning and Skills Council who, among other things, fund Further Education.

Merging the two bodies who fund college and university education seems logical, even neat. It means however, that the Liberal Democrats are proposing the creation of a mega-QUANGO at the very moment a Bill is passing through parliament to break up the LSC and devolve their funding powers to local councils. Government legislation embracing devolution and localism to a greater degree than Lib Dem policy? Perish the thought.

Being laid up with the traditional conference cold has given me plenty of time to reflect on our biannual shing-ding. Though I may have been feverish at the time, the conclusion I’ve reached is that for our party to make the national parliamentary breakthrough it has worked so hard to earn, we do indeed need a new approach to devolution. A new devolution settlement is needed in our own party – one in which our party’s democratic machinery devolves power up to the leadership. Read the rest of this entry »

Who do they think they're talking to? Political party website content reviewed

This blog post is a supporting post in a series examining the effectiveness of British political party websites – for a summary of the short study, and my conclusions, click here.

I ended my summary post with the question “how did the party websites become so universally dull?” It’s easy to leave a question floating, much more dangerous to attempt to answer it. Below, I lay out my thoughts not as a polished prescription, but as a conversation starter for the parties.

As we aproach a general election and I open a political party website, it can be a little like sitting next to a stranger on a long train journey. I might be lucky enough to find someone interesting and engaging, who is up for a stimulating conversation. If it goes really well, maybe we’ll exchange contact details, have a few drinks, and a beautiful friendship is born out of a chance encounter. Alternatively, I might get the latent drunk – peacefuly asleep until the very last minute, when he suddenly starts shouting meaningless babble over my head at no-one in particular.

Political party website content generally takes one of three forms. First is rolling news and comment – press releases, and web news stories. Second  is information on campaigns and policies. Finally, information on conferences, and things like resources for activists – content for the internal audience.

Given that there will be a heavy supporter bias in the visitors to any political party site, rolling news well done is an opportunity to keep activists and supporters engaged and motivated. A balance is required between news and comment on the issues of the day, and news and comment on the party itself. This latter group of content – information about the people in HQ, the process stories, candidate selections, has a significant, and I would argue growing,  pulling power. However, parties are too keen to push this news to infrequently produced paper newsletters, or to Home sites.

Read the rest of this entry »

Who do they think they're talking to? – How the political party sites rank globally

This blog post is a supporting post in a series examining the effectiveness of British political party websites – for a summary of the short study, and my conclusions, click here.

Generally, my preferred measure of global website popularity comes from compete.com, who in this case only record traffic for the BNP and the Conservatives.

According to compete.com, the Conservative Party saw 4,698 unique visitors in June 2009 to the BNP’s 3,343. Unfortunately, in this  case Compete is not the best site to use – Compete’s figures massively under-report the actual traffic, probably because the majority of their data is gathered in the US.

Alexa

Without access to the likes of Hitwise, this forces me into the rather unpredictable world of Alexa. I don’t normally assign a great deal of weight to Alexa figures, and will avoid rehashing the arguments for and against their data here. However, I wasn’t prepared to use Alexa ranking as part of the scores, so they don’t have any bearing on the end result.

Read the rest of this entry »