Archive: 22 March – 28 March 2010
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Friday 26 March 2010
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As if Gordon Brown didn't have enough problems, the hard left is appealing to disaffected trade unionists by fielding parliamentary candidates in 40 constituencies in protest against Labour's perceived failure to represent workers properly.
Last night's launch of the Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition (Tusc) rests on general unhappiness with Labour's track record. But who will benefit on polling day?
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It's a Twitter chain that begins with a Simon Mayo listener, which goes to Simon Mayo to Andrew Rawnsley and then to us, but it's true - page 369 of Rawnsley's book does contain an "eye-opening claim about Geoff Hoon" from Blair's May 2006 reshuffle. Continue reading...
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I read in today's Guardian that Jack Straw's latest plans for a reformed and wholly-elected second chamber have been "derailed" by no less a track saboteur than Peter Mandelson. Oh good. That will teach them to rush into complex matters for short-term electoral gain.
Where do we start here? In my case, by admitting an unabashed reactionary strain about the deployment of constitutional reform as a panacea for what are essentially our current ills, which are political, not structural ones.
For instance, I still cannot believe that the Labour party has committed itself to votes at 16. Why on earth would any sensible adult – even Gordon Brown backs this move – want to do that? Especially at a time when the voter participation rate of 18 to 24-year-olds is so poor and creeping upwards into the under-30 range?
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Thursday 25 March 2010
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It's an expenditure for an outcome that would leave most news organisations perplexed: dispatching 50 reporters, using Flip video cameras, to interview as many as possible candidates in the general election. There are 650 seats up for grabs in this election. Now multiply that by how many people you normally see on a ballot paper ...
But it is the aim of Winkball, a video-sharing website. James Ohene-Djan, a lecturer in computing in Goldsmiths College, and a co-founder (the other is Duncan Barclay, a son and nephew of the brothers) agrees it is expensive - exact words: "It's expensive" - but says he believes it demonstrates his company's technology. Winkball has also attempted to film in bulk at party conferences and in Westminster, is sending a team to Wales next week and, also, hopes some candidates will film and upload themselves. Continue reading...
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Tom Felton as Draco Malfoy in Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. Photograph: Jaap Buitendjik
David Cameron looked particularly pleased with himself yesterday when he dubbed Liam Byrne, the chief secretary to the Treasury, "Baldemort".
This blog is not at liberty to go into too much detail about Cameron's literary reference. That would mean revealing a name that must never be mentioned.
Suffice it to say that Baldemort was coined by the blogger Guido Fawkes, who is obviously a Harry Potter fan.
Cameron won some easy laughs for mocking the famously fastidious Byrne, who insists that his staff provide endless cups of coffee. But will the Tory leader regret bringing Harry Potter into the general election? Daniel Radcliffe, who plays Harry in the films, is a Lib Dem. J K Rowling, who created the character, is a big Gordon Brown fan. Continue reading...
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Alistair Darling delivering the budget yesterday. Photograph: PA
Steady on there, chaps. Tucked away at the end of the Guardian's leader column today is a suggestion that Alistair Darling is no longer "unthinkable" as a future Labour leader – and should certainly keep his job if Gordon Brown wins the coming election.
I'm sure the first suggestion would horrify the chancellor, who is modestly not that way inclined. As for the second, well, no, I don't think the current prime minister is going to be in a position to appoint the next chancellor on 7 May.
Level-headed chap that he is, I doubt if Darling thinks that either in his quieter moments, though in politics you have to be an optimist: it's what keeps them going.
How optimistic was yesterday's budget? How level-headed? The overnight media reaction has been mixed. The chancellor has gone from "Robin Hood" – helping the poor – to "Alistair in Wonderland" – ducking the debt mountain – in the space of 12 hours. It was ever thus.
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Wednesday 24 March 2010
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Screengrab of the Tory project to crowdsource the scrutinising of the budget Photograph: guardian.co.uk
As Alistair Darling sat down, a Tory project to crowdsource the scrutinising of the budget's small print went up. You can see it for yourself at yourbudgetresponse.co.uk.
There isn't a great deal to say yet. The design of the site reproduces each page of the budget with a box to the right that invites you to post your observations: "Did You find anything we should investigate further? Let us know below," it asks.
The format is similar to a cut-down version of our MPs' expenses crowdsourcing tool - the idea is the same (the ability to post comments on documents), though it lacks feedback mechanisms telling you, for example, how much of the budget has already been looked at.
Those observations are not visible on the site (also true for the later versions of our MPs' expenses exercise). But if you have added one, seen anything or have views on the project, why not let us know below.
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The budget was an excellent opportunity for MPs to provide commentary on activities in and around the Commons chamber.. Photograph: PA
MPs – political types in general – are some of the most enthusiastic tweeters. For the committed, the budget was an excellent opportunity to provide commentary on activities in and around the Commons chamber. Special mention here must go to Ian Cawsey, the Labour member for Brigg and Goole, who provided a near-continuous summary of Alistair Darling's speech.
The first tweet (our list of Tweeting MPs tells you who is on there) came from Sandra Gidley, Lib Dem MP for Romsey, who clarified which hashtag (the tags Twitter users deploy, and sometimes fight over, to mark up tweets on the same topic) she would be using. It would not be #fuckmedarling. Continue reading...
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Alistair Darling is clearly enjoying budgets more these days. Everyone at the top of government tried to tell us that today's would be boring. Any suggestion that it would be full of feelgood giveaways, or nakedly "political", was slapped down by the Treasury in advance. No 10 officials even said it would be "boring", a description they did not mean as a criticism. They just wanted us to think it would be a serious budget for serious times.
What clever downplaying of expectations.
As it turned out this was quite an unboring budget. Certainly it was less boring than many of Gordon Brown's.
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Listening to Alistair Darling's third budget you might be forgiven for thinking there isn't an election hurtling towards him. Who are these "others" and "some people" the chancellor kept mentioning in his speech, the ones who would have wrecked the economy if they'd been given half a chance?
They were the Tories, of course. But, being Darling, he didn't mention them by name until near the end and didn't indulge in any over politicking until he revealed - deadpan as ever – that one of the states with which Britain has negotiated a tax-avoidance clampdown is Belize. What's more the deal will be signed any day now, a lot faster than it took to sort out Lord Ashcroft's tax affairs.
By budget standards, certainly by Darling budget standards, it triggered unusually loud laughter on the Labour and Lib Dem benches, stoney faces behind David Cameron. It had taken a long time coming. This was a budget which didn't really need to happen, the taxes were mostly laid out at the PBR in December and the spending cuts will be fleshed out after the election. Continue reading...
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Budget 2010 speech as a Wordle. Click image for full picture
Was the "help" more important than the "how"? Find out which words Alistair Darling used in his speech today
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David Miliband, Alistair Darling and Lord Mandelson meet before the budget this morning. Photograph: Lefteris Pitarakis/pool/Reuters
Some fascinating, and mildly contradictory, polling numbers on the economy floating around this morning ahead of the budget. Ipsos Mori in the Daily Mirror shows the Tories with a five-point lead – 35% to 30% – in the state of the parties, but on the big proposition of whether to cut spending this year or next, the numbers comes out 57% to 30% in favour of the Labour position.
A third – 32% – name the economy as an issue that will be very important in helping them to decide who to vote for (more than any other issue). More of the public think the economy will improve (36%) than think it will get worse (29%) in the next 12 months. Less than a third (29%) of the public believe the Tories have the best policies on the economy – barely more than the 26% saying Labour.
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The budget box. Photograph: Stephen Hird/Reuters
The latest news and analysis and minute-by-minute coverage of Alistair Darling's budget statement, the Commons debate and reaction – with Andrew Sparrow
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Tuesday 23 March 2010
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The father of Palestinian militant Mahmoud al-Mabhouh holds up a family photo, at their home in the Jebaliya refugee camp, northern Gaza Strip. Photograph: Hatem Moussa/AP
• 'Compelling reasons to believe Israel responsible for misuse of British passports'
• Misuse of passports 'intolerable'
• Unnamed diplomat asked to leave UK
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Second working day of the week and already the Tories are on to their second eye-catching idea for the internet. Let's see how this one compares to Cash Gordon ...
The plan is to crowdsource the budget. That is not to ask the crowd to write it – we tried a slimmed-down version of that, and in the opinion of our economics editor, Larry Elliott, the wisdom of our crowd would most likely lead to rioting in the streets (his piece and full results coming soon). It is, instead, to post the document on their website and ask members of the public to help identify the problems contained in the small print.
This isn't a new idea for the Tories; in the Christmas/New Year period the party announced a £1m competition to develop a website that could "harness the wisdom" of voters to "resolve difficult policy challenges". It is the first time the party will have tried it. What do you think? Add your thoughts below. We have already crowdsourced it on the @GdnPolitics Twitter stream and so far received one sceptical response: "Crowdsourcing isn't the same as getting feedback online. A crowdsourced budget would be: 'Here's £Xbn, how should we spend it?'"
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Sometimes, in the interests of dialectic, someone has to go against the rush hour, so here goes.
The three former cabinet ministers suspended by the parliamentary Labour party last night are scratching their heads wondering what rule they have broken, apart from the catch-all one of bringing the Labour party into disrepute. At least one I know feels they have been shredded for the thoughtcrime of being Blairites.
Their defence goes something like this: no evidence has been brought up to suggest that Stephen Byers improperly lobbied ministers on behalf of National Express. No evidence has been found to suggest that they did lobby ministers on behalf of this fictitious US lobbyist for financial gain. There is no evidence that if they had been given a job by this bogus US lobbyist that they would have avoided referring the appointments to advisory committee on business appointments, the body that oversees the jobs ministers and civil servants can accept after they have left office. Continue reading...
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Did you find time to watch the Dispatches expose of Stephen "taxi cab" Byers and other greedy MPs on Channel 4 last night? Or did you take the Sunday Times's word for what went on?
Best to have watched it. The power of grainy TV footage can – occasionally – be more powerful than the printed word. "Frankly disgusting," as David Cameron said at his press conference this morning.
In a pre-emptive strike against the only Tory in the frame, the Conservative leader was quick to say that Sir John Butterfill, the senior backbencher who boasted on camera that "it's quite likely that I will go to the Lords", won't. "Nothing is certain in this world," Sir John cautiously added on air.
"It is now," I murmured. Continue reading...
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Stephen Byers, Patricia Hewitt, Geoff Hoon who were suspended tonight from the Parliamentary Labour party. Photograph: PA
Join Andrew Sparrow for all the latest developments, including David Cameron's press conference
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Monday 22 March 2010
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David and Samantha Cameron. Photograph: Leon Neal/AFP/Getty Images
There will be no shortage of conspiracy theorists quick to claim that David and Samantha Cameron decided to have another baby as soon those opinion polls started to dip for the Tories in the new year. Anything to win that election, eh, Dave?
This is not really how sex works, because participants tend not to be focused on the calendar. If they were, few British babies would be born in July or August because they go on to start school – and sports – at a permanent disadvantage against the bigger kids. But it won't stop credulous cynics.
I know because I was once caught up in a silly row over Tony and Cherie Blair's fourth child. Leo Blair was born a year before the 2001 election after a pregnancy that all close witnesses later confirmed had taken the-then prime minister completely by surprise – and it was not a welcome one either, though he got over it, as people do. Continue reading...
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These are bad times for Stephen Byers. It may come to nothing, but there is dark talk that he should be suspended from the parliamentary party, or even the party itself for bringing Labour into disrepute.
Some in Downing Street think he is doing more damage to the party than Tony Woodley, the joint general secretary of Unite.
Either way between the BA picket lines and Byers announcing he is a cab for hire, Brown is losing more precious time than he would like voters to devote to taking "another long hard look" at the Tories. Continue reading...
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Harriet Harman, the leader of the Commons, will make an oral statement to the house on 'paid advocacy and lobbying' Photograph: PA
Join Haroon Siddique for live coverage of Harriet Harman's statement to MPs on 'paid advocacy and lobbying'
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Gordon Brown's digital Britain speech as a Wordle. Click graphic for big image
Simon Rogers: Can data win elections? I'm beginning to wonder if it might be the case
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How sophisticated is the Conservatives' digital strategy? If you've stumbled on the 'Cash Gordon' campaign you'd be forgiven for thinking the party has conjured an elite squad of internet wizards out of the ether.
It certainly looks very slick. The Conservatives' official blog yesterday revealed the Cash Gordon campaign attacking the Prime Minister's links to the Unite union, and encouraging supporters to earn 'action points' by reading, donating or tweeting about the campaign, which is built around Facebook Connect.
Which is all very clever. But if this all seems a little too slick - it is probably because the site is based on an off-the-shelf template developed by a US anti-healthcare lobbyist. In the words of @wdjstraw: "Tory #cashgordon campaign brought to you by the team that tried to scupper US healthcare reform. #ToryFail"
Compare cash-gordon.com with noenergytax.com. (Not, as I first said, with Operation Waiting Game, which is rallying supporters against President Obama's healthcare reforms):
Cash Gordon, reports Political Scrapbook, also hosted beside campaign sites Hands Off, which aggregates tweets against healthcare reforms, Americans for the Military's petition against homosexuals in the armed forces and, just for good measure, the Heritage Foundation's attacks against carbon trading legislation. All perfect right-wing bedfellows, but perhaps a little unseemly for the Cameron machine.
Political Scrapbook claims the site cost $15,000, which makes it a fairly expensive decision: "Contrived to herd visitors through a linear series of actions, Cash Gordon rewards users with a system redolent of primary school 'merit points'. Once you've read Michael Gove's bonkers"new militant tendency" speech (described by the FT as "lazy politics") you receive a gold sticker – oh sorry – 25 points. Helping to bombard Charlie Whelan with hectoring tweets (straight out of the #kerryout playbook) gets you 20 points."
@BeauBodOr "Like the fact you get 50% extra points if you're a non-dom on the #cashgordon website." We don't think that's true, but then again...
And lastly, whoever cobbled together the rent-a-crowd site decided not to moderate tweets with the hashtag #cashgordon. Cue carnage:
@OllyBeat "All tweets with #cashgordon appear on Tory campaign website. The sh*t door is open and the nutters are pouring in. See you there..."
• Update: And... cash-gordon.com has been taken down. It now redirects back to conservatives.com. But only after the mischief-makers discovered not only that were Tweets unmoderated but the page was accepting code that let the page be hacked and redirected.
Remarkably, the site stayed up long enough for the situation to escalate from uncomplementary tweets and very naughty language to an amusing picture of 'Dave' Cameron and eventually the inevitable Rickroll/porn hack. As well as a redirect to the Labour Party site.
Bet you won't see an unmoderated hashtag on conservatives.com for a while.
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Former minister Stephen Byers. Photograph: Martin Argles
Another day, another political scandal and Stephen Byers has just referred himself to the standards watchdog. Oh dear. I had hoped to write about Barack Obama's costly victory in the important battle to inject greater fairness and efficiency into the American healthcare system.
Of course Obama's win – and the boost it gives his battered presidency – is much more important than what Byers said to a young woman he thought represented an American firm of lobbyists. But it's not where we are today at Westminster.
The woman asking the questions was actually representing the Sunday Times and Channel 4's Dispatches. There was a camera in the flower vase: you can watch the results at eight o'clock tonight. "I'm a bit like a cab for hire, I suppose, at the moment," Byers is seen saying. Oh dear again. Continue reading...