The atmosphere in Westminster is oppressive. Hop up the steps from the tube and the cries from the Tamils on Parliament Square bite your ears. I’ve seen plenty of protests on that piece of green over the past few years, but this one crackles like a storm-cloud ready to discharge a bolt of lightning.
The wind seems angry too, sweeping through Victoria Tower Gardens, pulling the hats off tourists and messing up their grey comb-overs. The pigtails on school children billow in syncronicity with the union flag above the tower.
Meanwhile, the press and the suits hurry in and out of the building. They ignore the angry mob and the red flags across the street, and yet they are under attack. They shrug off the violent wind, yet there is a storm brewing inside.
A man of about thirty moves slowly through the crowd. He has a grubby brown jacket and a bad back, both of which accounts for the angry expression on his face. He is hungry and slightly dazed from some painkillers, which accounts for the punch-drunk gait. The protesters, the tourists, the wind, don’t help his mood. Seeds, pollen from the trees, waft down and interfere with his eyes.
And as he approaches Millbank, a tall man in a light grey suit emerges from one of the offices, and turns back towards the Palace. Around his neck hangs a security pass, one with the green and white stripes, the most sought-after there is. He walks with his head bowed, looking at his feet, and doesn’t see the man in the brown jacket lumbering towards him. And the man in the brown jacket has no inclination to move. Only when they are in each other’s personal space, does the man with the green striped security pass feel the presence of the other. He twitches only slightly but is visibly startled. It is as if he is expects to be mugged on the street.
He, the politician, regains his stride and heads towards The Commons. I, the man in the brown jacket, haul myself into the coffee shop on the corner, the better to take refuge from the storm.
Tag: Politics (Page 39 of 57)
Gaurav Mishra supplies a useful model of social media (via Global Voices Advocacy). His “4Cs” are
- Content
- Community
- Collaboration
- Collective Action
… each stage being progressively harder to achieve than the last. He suggests measuring any given ‘social media’ campaign against this framework.
I am reminded of an event run by the think tank Demos a few months ago, How To Make News And Influence People, chaired by Charlie Leadbeater. I had refrained from writing up my thoughts until now, because I had hoped a podcast of the event would emerge. No such luck.
The discussion centred almost entirely around using the web and other technologies for PR purposes. We saw a fascinating presentation on how the photographs of James Nachtwey, winner of the 2007 TED Prize, were used to promote awareness of a new and extreme form of Tuberculosis, and the campaign to eradicate it at XDRTB.org. My question (which I had vainly hoped, and hoped in vain, would be on a podcast) drew the distinction between raising awareness amongst the generally sympathetic public (is there anyone against TB?) and establishing a consensus on a political issue, where there wasn’t one before (gay marriage, and the legalisation of marijuana are two issues that spring to mind). The multi-platform techniques described in the event seemed to be perfect for the former, but did not (to use Mishra’s analysis) harness a significant colelctive intelligence.
What was also noteworthy about the XDRTB campaign in particular, and about advocacy campaigns in general, is how they still rely on the mainstream media for traction. Immigration Minister Phil Woolas gave into the demands of the ghurka campaign when it received significant celebrity-focussed media coverage. My work at PEN has a large element of this too, where we arrange for our more famous members to speak out in favour of our campaign. This has always been the way of traditional PR campaigns (c.f The Onion classic Rare Disease Nabs Big-Time Celebrity Spokesman). This is entirely different from the highly connected campaigns such as #amazonfail and this week’s #fixreplies Twitter clusterfuck. The celebrity-free, crowd-driven campaigns still seem to focus mainly on issues with a strong online or technological focus.
The lives of those with distinguished World War II military careers still pepper the obituary pages, but not with the frequency that they once did. I enjoyed this passage from his obituary by Roy Roebuck:
He first arrived at the Commons with his newly awarded Distinguished Flying Cross ribbon inexpertly self-sewn on to his uniform. A Conservative MP, who was a squadron leader in the RAF police, approached. “You are improperly dressed,” he told Millington.
“If you are talking to me as an RAF officer,” Millington replied, “take your hand out of your pocket and address a senior officer as ‘Sir’. If you are addressing me as a fellow MP, mind your own business and bugger off.” He did.
Millington famously won a by-election in the true-blue Tory seat of Chelmsford, standing for the short-lived Common Wealth Party. Its objectives were “common ownership, democracy, and morality in politics.” Perhaps it should re-form in time for the Euro elections next month?
(cross-posted at Liberal Conspiracy)
I’ve been helping the Convention on Modern Liberty edit some videos in support of the project. My colleague Portia made a compilation:
Please do have a gander, and pass it on to your friends.
At the fantastic and soon-to-be-essential techPresident, there’s a post on a new technological openness from Congressional Republicans. Although their site at GOP.gov carries pretty run-of-the-mill content, it actually has an extremely substantial API. For non-technophiles, the API is the Application Programming Interface, and gives all the information that programmers would need to interact with the site, and – crucially – to pull data from it. Nancy Scola notes that people have been wondering what the Obama Administration has in store for the whitehouse.gov site, and suggests that a robust API may be more important than ensuring that there are enough photos of the Obama’s for us to gawk at ( abug-bear from a few days ago).
And that raises the idea that for all the attention we’ve been paying whitehouse.gov, maybe thinking about the White House site as a destination is just wrong-headed. The focus should instead, perhaps, be on pushing clean data — and the engagement it can fuel — out from the White House , in the hopes of creating “government everywhere.”
Its Big Brother in reverse. A robust API removes another barrier to scrutinizing the government and legislators, something that will become ever more important as President Obama begins to spend the $800 billion or so in his ‘”fiscal stimulus” package, and the Senators and Representatives start to vote on any number of issues. There will be no escape!
I do think that the very fact of more information in the public domain will increase the trust people have in politicians, precisely because there is less room for obfuscation and drastically reduced room for corruption and misconduct. As I’ve noted previously, a Governmental cover-up is always worse, and much more annoying, than a Governmental cock-up. We saw an example of this earlier in the week, where President Obama made a swift mea culpa when it turned our that two cabinet nominees had not been vetted properly, and not paid their taxes. An early admission neutralises the story.
It also goes some way to restoring the trust that has been lost through the cock-up. Why? Because it avoids the possibility that Government spokespeople will have to engage in the sort of verbal and logical gymnastics, the mongering of letter-but-not-the-spirit technicalities, that characterised the Bush administration… and which still plagues New Labour.