“…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 be popular - computers for kids, free prescriptions for cancer patients, nursery places from 2. An illustration of the huge challenges of the current environment, and how the ‘new settlement’ leads naturally to action to regulate financial markets and on climate change. A roundup of the good work of the rest of the cabinet. Straight through a solid defence of continued investment in public services and praise for public servants (though conveniently not a sausage on their pay deal). Read the rest of this entry »

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: Read the rest of this entry »

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, or the lack of them for many workers. Union learning projects in particular (who have a good history of training thousands in basic IT literacy) picked up on it very keenly and thousands of offline families used it to get connected for the first time. Read the rest of this entry »

Geek amusement of the day comes from Tom Watson and Chris Paul, who are gloating to various degrees over the Facebook humbling of South Manchester MP/Councillor John Leech, after it was exposed that his Labour rival for the seat, Lucy Powell, had 124 times his number of friends. Politeness (and a keen awareness that I don’t have too many facepals myself) keeps me from mentioning the exact size of Mr Leech’s online entourage - you’ll have to click. Read the rest of this entry »

Look at this. It certainly looks the business.

In recent years, Labour seem to have eschewed the Tories’ strategy of slick New Media launches, aimed at offline column inches rather than online impact. From ‘Dave in India’, through Webcameron’s diminishing returns, to the recent banner ads, the Tories have very pragmatically spent online in order to look innovative to the offline majority, who will never actually bother with this politico-geekery themselves. It didn’t matter really what they did, so long as they looked stylish, modern and open, and had enough buzzwords on-site to impress the scribblers.

Put against this, Labour seem in the last year to have taken this web stuff all a bit too seriously. Rather than media launches, they’ve worked through a bunch of policy consultations, and tools designed to up their supporters’ web literacy. The byzantine MPURLs system is a world away from Webcameron, and seems to show a party actually looking for ways to take the technology seriously. Focusing internaly has had benefits in building a core of activists who are web literate, and I think is the correct strategy long term, but it’s let the Tories lap us more than once in the race to be seen as innovative. Read the rest of this entry »

Thanks to Roger for pointing out this piece in the Graun today about Alan Johnson’s political twitterering.

I can see the attraction of microblogging for putting your worthiness about, without the efforts of writing a full-on short-term leadership blog. As Alan’s e-Campaigner Stuart Bruce says:

“Being secretary of state for education and employment is a critical job and there is no way Alan could do a blog properly. It’s better to not blog than to do it badly. Most people don’t have a clue what senior politicians do. Using Twitter gives a real insight and clearly shows that he’s an ordinary guy.”

I’m not so sure about his other suggestions on how Twittering is a more inclusive format than blogging:

“Only 60 % of UK households use the internet regularly. Mobile phone penetration is nearly 100 %. Twitter is a way of making the campaign much more accessible to most people.”

In principle, sure, Twitter is great for letting those of us without a computer keep in the loop. But I’d question not just how many people have ever heard of Twitter in the UK that don’t already have internet access too, but how many people outside of the bloggerati - that least representative group of Labour members - have the faintest whit what all this is about in the first place.

This is where I think the lovely democratic potential of web2.0 often falls down. It can spread like lightening through people who are already linked in to it, but new services lack the marketing money or revenue shares to get into the places they need to be to be seen by Jo/e Punter - on the sides of London buses, or integrated into the phone networks’ portals.

Any hint of a glorious dawn of 1-1 communications with our elected leaders should be grabbed at whilst we can though - it looks to be winding down already in the USA. Facebook have a special category for US politicians now. You can’t be a friend of John Edwards (Alan’s comrade in twittering) any more, but instead get the chance to register yourself to support him - something a fair way different!

However it’s good to see that Alan & Stuart are taking their gimmicks seriously and are on the ball on keeping things updated - my facebook friend request was reciprocated much quicker than from most of my real friends

My gimmick tip to Stuart (tho he’s most likely doing it already) - a well-touted MyBlogLog profile. Most political bloggers would be disproportionally well flattered if it looked like Alan had been reading their pages!

Have you had a go at LabourSpace yet? It’s a sort of Big Brother for NGO campaigns. Every month there’s a new theme, and relevant lobby groups add their favourite campaigns. Users to the site vote on the campaigns, and the winner gets to have tea with Tony and Hazel and bend their ears a bit.

Anyway this is ‘work month’, which means unions are up for the prize. And so far there are 3 union campaigns in the house, two from the CWU and one from the TUC. They are:

Give Safety Some Teeth! (TUC)

Fines for work safety breaches are stupidly low in comparison with other corporate offences (compare £980,000 for Nationwide’s slip up in potentially revealing customer information with Granite Ltd’s £10,000 fine for not securing slabs which crushed an employee to death). Hundreds of people are still being killed at work in the UK every year, for want of some very simple safety measures. But bad employers will look at the tiny fines they might get and decide they can swallow lots of those rather than just pay up to play safe. Raising the level of fines will be simple, quick, uncontroversial with any decent employers, and save lots of lives.

Justice for Agency Workers (CWU)

Labour has done a lot of good in upping the UK’s stautory minimum working conditions, but there’s a gaping hole in this otherwise excellent work, which temp workers often fall through. A lot of people like agency work, but it’s also the case that many do it because so many companies are shirking their employer responsibilities by outsourcing that they can’t get a full time job. Whatever the reason, people working as temps shouldn’t be forced to take a huge hit in rights that everyone else now takes as a minimum standard. The Government has put back legislation on this recently, so this is an opportunity to keep up the pressure.

Save Gloucester Mail Centre (CWU Gloucestershire)

A reminder that unions are about standing together to protect their members in local disputes comes from the third campaign, which is seeking to get Royal Mail to reconsider plans to close a mail centre that would affect 400 staff working there. Instead they want to see the company conduct a proper study into the stated reasons for the closure, which look to be a smokescreen for cost cutting, or at least provide more serious support than is currently proposed for affected staff. The branch fear that this could be the start of a round of cutbacks in regional mail provision.

So if you’d like to see some tanks on the No10 lawn (or at least some union campaigners in the Cabinet Office), pick up your mouse and get clicking at LabourSpace.com

A bit of a barney is breaking out over Labour conference lanyards (those little strings that hold your pass round your neck). In an attempt to plug holes in the coffers, sponsorship of anything that moves is vital, and the organisers have pulled off a coup in getting a company to splurge their name all over these yokes around our necks, hurrah!

The company in question… Mr Murdoch’s Sky. Hmmm… not going down so well with some of the comrades, and the GMB union have decided to offer delegates a nice red GMB campaigning lanyard (advertising their AA dispute campaign), rather than the white Sky ones. A dilemna for delegates. Ordinarily I’d rather have a nice red union one (I generally pack a red tie, so it’d match!), but in usurping the official lanyard, would you be downgrading the value of the sponsorship, and hence the likelihood of scooping the party another big wadge of easy money next year (Don’t know how it can be worth the cash - will anyone be subliminally convinced over the week to go home and buy a Sky dish)?

So, which side are you on - white or red?

I’ve been amused by the developments in lanyard technology over the last few conferences I’ve been to - no longer a humble bit of string, but an increasing waste of time and plastic. They get more and more complex, and now they all seem to have little plastic safety break points to stop strangling you, a plastic-reinforced Y shape join, and metal swivel toggle, to let the pass hang straighter, and a plastic and metal quick release belt loop attachment, so you can stick it somewhere else if you’d rather. Plus they’re getting fatter to accommodate the sponsorship. I fully expect them to be wi-fi enabled by next year’s round of conferences.

Well, yes apparently we do now, and it’s called Labourhome.org. Very mysterious, a nice open blog to stimulate debate in Labour’s digital grassroots (grassw00ts?) circles - a MySpace for us tired lefty hacks.

It’s quite elegant (in the way only an empty website can be) and it seems to be built to encourage newbies to adding their 4pth without being intimidated by the cliqueishness of the more energetic political blogs. Hopefully there are going to be some more detailed help files coming though, as it’s likely to totally bewilder anyone who’s not already thoroughly used to this kind of thing.

Anyway, well done those chaps, and let’s hope this is one of the first steps we need to start catching up slightly with the right wing blogohemisphere, who’ve rather stolen a march on us. I hope Conservativehome realise that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery!

http://www.labourhome.org