First Nigel roundly berates the left blogohemisphere for our lack of a coherent critique of the current financial crisis (gulp), but then his colleagues Adam and Janet very kindly go and plug up the gap a bit themselves, at least enough to keep me safe for opinions at dinner parties for a little while (now …
“…is to face them down.” A very good speech that, solid social democratic territory. Straight through. No grovelling, even where he admitted mistakes. “I’m not going to change to something I’m not”. A coherent vision around ‘fairness’ and a ‘new settlement for new times’. Clear new policies that illustrate the fairness vision and that should …
Waiting for Gordon to come on the telly. Interesting choice of music to settle the crowd in the conference hall, courtesy of Manchester legends James. Cracking tune obviously and has us humming nostalgically, but I’m sure the diarists are going over it already:
I was one of those very disappointed by Gordon Brown’s sudden withdrawal of the Home Computing Initiative (a salary sacrifice tax incentive on internet kit and connections) in 2006. The scheme was a great example of a partnership between government, industry and unions to tackle a problem that rightly concerned them all – IT skills, …
Jason over at the newly rejuvenated Communicate or Die has been coming up with some great posts of late – recommended reading even for us on the wrong side of the pond. I liked his distinction today between rough democracy and formal democracy, in trying to explain why unions are hesitant about going ‘open source’ …
LabourStart’s photo group on flickr is a great resource for unions and activists looking to illustrate internationally focused communications work. It’s a group of more than 3,000 mostly Creative Commons licensed photographs of unions at work (mostly marching to and fro with flags to be honest, but that gets better pics than branch meetings I …
No – not a reference to the way our current ‘extended lunchbreak of discontent’ levels of strike action are being touted in our cliché-befuddled national press, but I’m making a rare trip out West to see James Graham’s new play ‘Sons of York‘, a family drama illustrating the period of profound national change at the …
Iain Dale made a flying visit to Congress today – He doesn’t seem to have been impressed enough to hang around with us. Iain may lack Richard Balfe’s staying power (he’s been lurking in the corridors outside the hall for days now) but it looks like did shift a few copies of his Total Politics …
At Congress 2008 in Brighton, which is turning out as interesting as ever – spending a week in the company of pretty much every element of the UK labour movement. I spoke at a fringe today on online organising, along with Eric Lee and APT’s Paul Smith. For the 99.995% of trade unionists who didn’t …
Politics and new-media goodie-bag blog Dadblog is sadly shutting up shop, but luckily only to move a few doors down the road to “I’ve Said Too Much“, where lloydshep opens up again with an interesting take on how the internet both helps and hinders campaigning.