johninnit

Nice note from Asabailey, viral marketing gurus and new Tory ad agency. I like their stuff a lot (my favourite of late has to be their Cannes Web2.0 song – more than a bit NSFW btw). Anyway, they’re showing the first of their new series of Tory attack ads on YouTube:

In response to Lord Saatchi’s most recent calls for the Conservative party to stop its “nicely nicely approach to advertising and PR” and to get back to basics, Asabailey have created this online viral and TV campaign to create debate between consumers and the media in the Midlands and the North of England, all as an early general election looks ever more likely.

Using real Mobile Phone style footage, and images of “life under Labour” the campaign highlights the darker sides of life in modern New Labour Britain and places the blame firmly at the feet of the current Labour government.

Call me old fashioned, but I thought it could be construed a bit of a cheek to bang on about teenage thuggery if you used to be in your own young ruffians gang. Or maybe Dave, George and Boris are able to understand the problem much better than Labour, having been there, done it (over) and so on.

Anyways, I thought I’d share it with you. Oops, silly me, now where did I put the original file… Is it this one?

Ah.. it all makes sense now:

Of the 27 members of David Cameron’s Shadow Cabinet, 12 have outside jobs with 32 directorships between them. The 120 members of the shadow government team hold 115 paid directorships or other outside posts between them. This means they rake in thousands on top of their £60,675-a-year MP salaries. Daily Mirror 15/08/07

This must be why John Redwood and George Osborne are so keen to bin the Working Time Directive. Poor things, they need all the hours they can get in the day to hold down all their other jobs.

An interesting argument I’d not considered before. Maybe the millions who would lose holidays under Redwood’s plans (down from already the shortest statutory paid holidays in Europe) should just stop worrying and get a few directorships instead?

Today’s Torygraph front page (look, I had to buy it for work, okay!), left me pretty speechless. The nasty party is well and truly back. Redwood and Osborne plan a new policy direction to launch on Friday, but it seems to be too juicy a story to keep wraps on.

The idea is that we could save a whole heap of money without a few little fripperies that no-one will miss anyway. Stuff like:

• Health and safety at work
• The Working Time Directive
• data protection
• Safe care homes
• ‘Best Value’ councils
• Home Information Packs (yes, well…)
• Food supplement regulations
• Venture capital regulation
• Money laundering restrictions
• Mortgage regulation
• Waste incineration regulation
• Unfair dismissal protection
• BBC services outside TV

I’m not sure whether to be happy about this. It gives us some pretty clear blue water to define ourselves against, makes Cameron look like a total charlatan for changing so dramatically, and will rally the Labour troops very nicely. On the other hand, it’s like something from a zombie film sequel – the stumbling nightmare has returned, and that is enough to scare me a lot.

Some of their points will go down better than they should with floating voters. Health and safety is very hard to defend against the braying anti-PC mob, as people don’t tend to notice the fact they haven’t lost any limbs recently. Likewise with the working time directive (everyone tends to think they’re the only ones working whilst everyone else is slacking off), even though this would really hammer millions of people in the worst jobs, who really need it to protect their vulnerable family lives from exploitative employers.

Maybe the things we need to focus on are the ones that scare people silly about their own financial situation. This might be moves to make it easier to fire you, or to transfer financial services regulation to some of the only people voters trust less than politicians – the banks. Add onto that a free hand for big finance, and the fact that without data protection regulation, the Tories’ sinister corporate pals will be able to snoop on you however they like. There could be a compelling argument about the Tories trying to hand us all over to the less trustworthy side of big business done up like a kipper.

Also good is the Liberal angle that the sums are wrong, topped with the fact they mightn’t be able to ditch the WTD without an almighty spat with the EU (they lost the legal argument last time they tried, so I don’t see how they can do it now. All that makes them look just a bit dim, and as though they’re playing to their true instincts rather than having genuine new ideas, or taking modernisation at all seriously.

Reaction to it going off half-cocked like this has so far been encouragingly bad, but it’ll be interesting to see how it plays across the Tory party. I wonder if this is going to get watered down come Friday?

Prospective mayoral candidate Boris Johnson is no fan of health and safety regulations, apparently regularly declaring his hero to be Larry Vaughn, the fictional mayor in Jaws, who refused to close the beaches after expert testimony and evidence of the first shark attack, leading to another free lunch for the film’s eponymous anti-hero.

Apparently the odd gobbled bather here and there is a small price to pay for the business freedoms that come with under-regulation. The latest gaffe from London’s would be gaffer is taken from a speech he gave last year at Lloyds of London:

“The real hero of Jaws is the mayor. A gigantic fish is eating all your constituents and he decides to keep the beaches open. OK, in that instance he was actually wrong. But in principle, we need more politicians like the mayor – we are often the only obstacle against all the nonsense which is really a massive conspiracy against the taxpayer.”

Wonder how many more safety reps are going to be out canvassing for Ken now?

Hat tip – Mars Hill

Eek! Spotted at Charing Cross this morning – an advert for a new Kent housing development, with a logo I’m sure I’ve seen somewhere before.

Indeed, a quick shufty at their website seems to confirm it. “The traditions of yesterday”, “cricket green”, “all the benefits normally associated with a exclusive country club.” The pub is called the Spitfire, and the photos in the brochure aren’t exactly multi-cultural. Plus of course there are the whopping great gates at the front to “engender a private community”.

A gated village? In the Tory heartland of rural Kent? Egad! It appears that Cameron has given up all hope of winning the next election and instead is working on an emergency plan B – The construction of a top-secret Tory fortress, where the Cameroonies can hole up and plot their sinister revenge on the nation.

Thanks to Martin at Blogging4Merton for a bit of nostalgia whilst reading Bloggers4Labour on my commute in to work*. Where were you on 22 November 1990, when Maggie announced her resignation?

I was at 6th form college, in my A level politics class, when we heard cheering coming through the wall from the class next door. A few seconds later, one of the maths teachers burst into our classroom to announce “She’s gone!”. He was breathless, after he’d been on a tour of most of the campus already, wanting to be the first to bring the news to everyone. Off he went to the next classroom, and the cheering started in ours.

*Thanks to some quirk of RSS (or maybe my phone’s cacheing software), his post was displayed a week late, so apologies for my (characteristically) getting to this a long while after everyone else!

And on the subject of webcameron… Have you seen their new web-widget, which is finally live? It’s neat-o in a not tremendously useful way to the user, though it probably does wonders for webdave’s googlejuice, having all those keyword terms linking in from around the web.

I thought I’d put it here, but mainly because I noticed a bit of a ’separated at birth’ moment. Remember Dave the Chameleon, and his attempts to pinch policies from all and sundry? Well, funny how you never see them on the same site at the same time and all that…

dinner for Dave	webcameron widget

At the NHStogether lobby today, where health professional union members were gathering to give their MPs a co-ordinated earbashing on NHS matters such as deficits, privatisation and consultation on change.

Wandering around with his dinky camcorder was none other than toryboy2.0 Sam Roake, trying to get vox pop interviews with health professionals for webcameron. He was being quite philosophical that nearly all the people he approached declined his offer of lasting fame, with quite a few of them declining in terms which I’m far too modest to print on this blog.

Anyway, you can see his results on webcameron here. His perseverence eventually paid off and he got a few interviewees. Well spin-doctored by calling it a protest and mixing it with shots of the Socialist Party’s “Sack Blair” march (claiming thousands of marchers – possibly the first time I’ve seen the Tories overestimate a leftie demo). Anyway, I reckon he deserves two cheers at least for being brave enough to venture into the unions’ den without cricket pads.

I wonder how the conversation went?

Dave: So, hey, looks like Blair’s going to get a kicking at the union lobby today, maybe we should get in on that.
Sam: But Dave, won’t they bite us and beat us with their whimsical folk-art banners as soon as we step in the door? At very least we’d probably catch MRSA or something.
Dave: A risk, certainly, but if we’re going to foster a new, mature and open approach to politics, we surely need to ‘be the change’ and reach out to everyone, no? A little personal danger is a very small price to pay for that.
Sam: Gosh, that’s very true. Maybe we could try to find out what they actually want then – Get some interviews with some real people – represent their concerns in a way that the news bulletins will just gloss over.
Dave: Yes, yes, and then trim out all the bits about extra funding under Labour and how bad we used to be and all that.
Sam: Er, okay. So shall I call us a cab?
Dave: Hmm… Actually, why don’t you go and just fill in for me? I’d love to, really, but these dishes aren’t going to wash themselves you know…

Check it out – I’ve got a sneak preview of the latest service from everyone’s favourite search engine:

Okay, only joking, but here’s an interesting piece in the Guardian today about new media behemoth Google’s first forays into politics, sponsoring candidates in the States (so far a Republican who’s in favour of net neutrality – admittedly an endangered species) and cosying up with Dave in front of the webcam over here.

The Google name itself has already done more than money could for the Tories – adding instant modernist kudos to their conference and the webcameron adventure. This new NetPAC sounds odd though, getting its funds from Google staffers.

Wonder if it will start to open any schisms at the Googleplex, where many of the hip young things are also of a fairly lefty bent. Heaven forbid the footsoldiers could start doubting the company’s “Do no evil” motto – something they may well be doing already, given the company’s wavering stance over its China operations and censorship.

After my post on political geekery, I thought it only proper that I should put up my own homage to the WWW – so here is “Camsterdance” (wtf?):

Play music – courtesy of Hampton the Hampster at Juno Records

Now, who’s for Dave Çagri “I kiss you!” – or would we get a case of the Sion Simons?