David Cameron's punt on the BBC Leaders' Debate was a mistake

Thursday evening saw another party leaders debate.  This time it was a BBC production, hosted by David Dimbleby.

David Cameron, the Prime Minister, chose not to take part. One assumes that he and his strategists had good reasons for his decision.  He has presided over many unpopular policies and would have been exposed to continual criticism.  Perhaps he and his advisers felt that he could only lose.

But his absence felt odd.  All the other participants were able to hammer the Coalition Government policies with impunity (Nick Clegg, the Liberal Democrat Leader and Deputy Prime Minister, was not there either).  Ed Miliband was able to take up the Prime Ministerial mantle unopposed.

Of the five parties that did show up for the debate, four are clearly to the left of David Cameron’s Conservatives and one, UKIP, are very much to the right.  Their closing statements were different and appealed to different demographics, but throughout all I could hear was the sound of the Comservatives hemorrhaging votes.

My hunch is that the nationalist parties will do very well on 7 May, and that UKIP will pick up votes that should otherwise have gone to the Tories.  I think this will allow Labour to prevail in a few seats that they may not otherwise have won, and that Miliband’s offer will persuade enough other voters.  Taken together, all these results will put Labour in a position to form their own minority or coalition government.  Of course, the campaign still has a few weeks left to run… but right now, I think Ed Miliband will become Prime Minister in May.

Why not do an extra leaders' debate via #Meerkat?

There’s a new app in town, called Meerkat.  It allows you to stream live video direct from your mobile phone or tablet, with the link appearing in your Twitter stream.
Dan Pfeiffer, a former senior advisor to Barack Obama, writes:

If 2004 was about Meetup, 2008 was about Facebook, and 2012 was about Twitter, 2016 is going to be about Meerkat (or something just like it).

(He is of course talking about US politics).  I wonder whether that’s true though: I fancy there may be a premium on asynchronicity—sending messages to people to read when they have time, rather than in the moment.  How much value is there in This Is Happening Literally Right Now over the Twitter news model of This Just Happened? Meerkat does not seem to have any catch-up functionality—if you click on a  link to a stream that has ended, there’s no way to view it back.  Other services like Ustream and Google Hangouts do offer that functionality and I bet the Meerkat devs are beavering away (or whatever it is a meerkat does) to get this feature into the app. Continue reading “Why not do an extra leaders' debate via #Meerkat?”

The SNP's Weak Cultural Case for Independence

Following Ed Miliband’s speech on national identity on Thursday, we were given a good look at the SNP’s communications strategy for their Independence campaign.
Responding to Miliband’s speech in a BBC interview, Humza Yousaf MSP likened ‘Britishness’ to ‘Scandanavian’ and asserted that an independent Scotland would still be British, by virtue of pure geography.
Later in the day, Alex Neil MSP made the same point on BBC Question Time. This is obviously disingenuous.
Continue reading “The SNP's Weak Cultural Case for Independence”