Help us in Hove! - 4 comments

Hove & Portslade CLP needs your help.

In "Disquiet at the electoral front", The Guardian singled out Hove (Labour majority 3,171), suggesting Tory prospects here as "very good" (Number 1 on their list).

I say here, because Hove ("Blogging capital of the South East") is home to Bloggers4Labour, as well as some other blogs you may have heard of: Hove Labour 2005, Oliver Kamm, and Chicken Yoghurt.

If you remember, Labour seized Hove & Portslade on a massive swing in 1997 after a lot of hard work, and restricted the Tories to a mere -0.3% swing in 2001. It would be a terrible shame to let the Tories grab it back after all the progress that has been made here, and especially given the psychological value to Labour of this seat.

What we need here is your support, your time, and (some of) your money. Here's who we're up against:

Nicholas Boles, Conservative. Pro-hunting, pro-the invasion of countries for their natural resources alone, perpetrator of doctored photographs, and rich enough to spread his influence right round the constituency.



Our candidate is Celia Barlow, who has only had a few months to introduce herself to Hove, following the resignation of Defence Minister, Ivor Caplin, last December.



If you're anywhere near the south coast in the next week (here's Hove on Google's Map), we'd love to have your help: delivering, canvassing, manning the phones, etc. or simply giving moral support! Situated just to the west of Brighton, Hove is fantastically easy to get to from London (directly to the north), from Chichester, Portsmouth, or Southampton in the west, and from Kent to the east.

All donations to this site (see the PayPal icon at the foot of the page) until the end of May 5th will be put towards the Hove campaign. Even £1 pays for leaflets and posters.

For more details on volunteering, please phone David on (07900) 453 458, Celia on (01273) 721677, or email us here.

Thanks for listening!

A fairy tale on trust / Liars - no comments

A charming tale on the theme of changing advice and that old chestnut trust, from Eric:

... Some Fools and Jesters accused the King of lying about the rain. They said that the Knights had not been told of the Weather Forecaster General's first opinion about the rain. Surely he had changed his mind about the rain? The King must have put the Weather Forecaster General in the rack, and told him to adjust his readings of the pine cones. The Knights had been lied to, and the first report had been withheld...

I don't think anyone's mind is going to be changed at this late stage - both sides have dug in - but there it is for the record.

For me, the issue of trust is a complete distraction (which is just the kind of politics some people like). I don't see politicians as being dishonest and don't accuse anyone of lying. My objection to the other parties is based upon their lousy, headline-friendly policies, their shameful pandering to peoples' prejudices, their ideologies, and the competence of their leaders.

Surely that's a more mature way to judge the parties?

"Going on strike" - no comments

According to "A World to Win", not voting on May 5 - which they raise from being an apathetic act to being a deliberate withholding of one's vote - represents a strike!

That's the problem with not participating in a free vote, it gives anyone with an interest in opposing legitimate political parties - people with no popular support themselves - the chance to say that you're backing them, even if you don't know it. That doesn't matter, though, because of course you're too stupid to know what's in your own best interests. Rupert Murdoch (the devil) has messed with your mind (of course, there may be some truth in this one!)

No: not voting doesn't represent a positive endorsement of anything. If these people had any guts they'd stand for election on their platform, that:

New Labour speaks and acts not simply for British business but more importantly for global capitalism.

and then we could see what the public thinks.

I wonder what other lessons they've learnt from Arthur Scargill...

http://www.aworldtowin.net/

A general theory of Labour - 1 comment

From A General Theory of Rubbish, and coming via Eric, here's a pretty good reason to be getting behind Labour:

The Labour Party (despite everything) retains its character as a labour organisation. The other parties do not. The pathetic Liberals are nothing but Tories without their kicking boots on and act as Tories whenever they gain any power. There (sic) potential for any radicalism is non-existent. I'm not wasting any time on them.
F*ck them.

Good stuff.

If you could do with a laugh... - 1 comment

No, it's not from the Independent. This guy clearly managed to bypass hospital security and fax his ramblings to The Guardian from Matron's office before the boys came round with the electrodes.

Read: The prime minister is a war criminal [hat tip to Harry]

With all the references to Chamberlain, Gott feels the weight of history upon his shoulders - or is it a burly staff nurse?

Brian Sedgemore defects? - 2 comments

Recess Monkey is reporting that Brian Sedgemore, retiring Labour MP for Hackney South & Shoreditch has defected to the Lib Dems.

Without wanting to trivialise matters, I think you can safely say Brian wasn't a happy bunny, as his final speech to the House shows...

Interestingly, the next speaker, Lib Dem Mark Oaten said the following:

Although I do not agree with all the points that he made, I admire his passion and commitment.

Hmm.

Get your email updates - no comments

Register here to get daily updates, in HTML or Text format.

Architects 4 Labour - 2 comments

A very interesting article about architecture, plus a run-down on how architects plan to vote. Here are the latest figures:

Labour: 59%
Liberal Democrat: 26%
Conservative: 5%
Others: 10%

Thanks to 5 for the article.

Sir John Major - 5 comments

Thanks to the Queen for this decision. After all, no form of political patronage, however corrupt, blinkered, or deluded, could have come up with it.

According to one garden gnome we spoke to, Mr. Major was "Moderately satisfied with the Queen's sound judgment on this matter."


... he sprung into action

Message to Michael Howard MP - 1 comment

Not that one, the real one!

If you happen to be reading, we're having trouble with your news feed(s). All three of the ones supplied on the page are failing (RSS 2.0, RSS 0.92, and Atom 0.3). FeedBurner says "We could not find a valid feed at that address" about each.

Please get in touch so we can display your articles here.

Yet more bloggers! - 4 comments

Our latest acquisitions:

• Talk Politics - "A mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred and schizophrenia - or the otherwise strage musings of a Labour supporter with a penchant from quoting Orwell..."
• Rullsenberg Rules - Cultural/social comment blog with more political Rullsenberg rants occasionally appearing.
• Jonathan Derbyshire - Politics, Philosophy, Culture.
• Peter Parkes - Society and the internet.
• Bowblog - A ten-year Internet veteran on British politics, technology and media.
• Minimal Harm - Personal Blog that will be supporting Labour and slamming the Lib Dems.
• Deep Calls to Deep - "a new kind of Christian blog"
• Derek Wyatt - Labour candidate for Sittingbourne and Sheppey.
• Life in Broadfield - "I'm an Essex boy who has ended up in Sussex after spending a long time in London..."
• Michael Howard MP - parody of Michael Howard's General Election blog.
• Grammar Puss - "She composed herself and a zeugma."

And finally:

• Five - Independent Coverage of the UK General Election 5th May 2005.

Let me know if you're not happy with your listing, or can suggest another Labour-supporting blog.

I notice that Hal Berstram at the Turtle Election Blog is also backing Labour this time, though he does say:

... only because my sitting MP only had a majority of 358 last time round, and the Tory challenger looked like a bloody shoproom dummy ...

I'm not sure that's enough to get on our list...

Keep the Faith - 2 comments

Keep the Faith is a website for Labour supporters. Strangely I'd never heard of it until yesterday, but the people who run it are young and talented, and seem to have the right ideas. Plus they seem to have had not only a hell of a lot of visitors, but the ear of the Blairs themselves. Cherie is quoted as follows:

"I showed Tony your website which we both thought is fantastic. It really a makes a difference to know good people are behind Tony in his effort to transform the country for the better"

Now why didn't I think of writing to Ministers?

Keep the Faith also help Labour MPs by assisting in the building of web sites. What I'd really like to see is all elected Labour officials moving from having a static web 'presence' to having blogs and forums (fora?) where local and national issues can be dealt with in detail, in as non-partisan a way as possible, and where their electorate can be kept in touch with their work, the progress that has been made, and the obstacles that have been met.

We all know blogging is still a somewhat small-scale operation in the UK, but the opportunities for political engagement are tremendous (and I'm not copying this off someone's press release).

Labour, being the only game in town when it comes to national politics, is in the perfect position to embrace this and move it forward. Perhaps there are signs that this is happening...

Galloway told to avoid his home - 1 comment

Respect candidate George Galloway has been advised to stay away from his home after receiving a death threat ... Mr Galloway was allegedly "threatened with death" by Islamic extremists at a meeting on Tuesday evening.

Well I'll just report the story. I'm sure Harry will provide a fuller account tomorrow (oops, later today).

New developments / censorship - no comments

I've slightly altered the way articles are displayed: the categories value (which many blogs don't set anyway) has been replaced with the name of the blog in question. That makes it easier to see (at a glance) who's posting.

Also, instead of displaying both the "person" icon and the blog icon (if present), now we only show the "person" icon if there isn't a blog icon.

Rampant censorship: For the benefit of our more delicate users, we now cleverly "bleep out" a handful of the naughtiest words that some of our bloggers, in their passion for Labour and for social justice, have slipped into their posts. For example: f*ck.

What happened to Tom? - no comments

Does anyone know if Tom Watson (former MP) has moved? Only www.tom-watson.co.uk seems to have been down for the last couple of days...

Tony Blair destroys cricket pitch - no comments

The otherwise splendid cricket blog, Corridor of Uncertainty, has decided to stick it to Tony Blair on the basis of a story that the PM's helicopters damaged a cricket pitch (pictures not supplied).

Naughty as that may be, I don't think we should take their advice and hark back to the days when cricket fan, John Major, was in power, glorious though that period was in our nation's history.

MoveOn - no comments

According to the New Statesman, the Labour Party has apparently hired Zack Exley, the controversial cyberactivist from liberal American website MoveOn.org:

... a major player in the 2000 presidential election which engaged in grassroots campaigning and claimed to have built an online community of some 2 million political activists. MoveOn created an uproar when it posted a video comparing Bush to Adolf Hitler. Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry went on to hire Exley as his Director of Internet Campaigns.

The article seems to imply that all MoveOn do with their time is engage in dirty tricks at the expense of their political opponents. That's certainly not how I see it. I see it as a campaigning site/organisation, bringing together liberals and the like-minded, organising them, getting a positive message across (e.g. the defence of Social Security), and rebutting the campaigns of the political Right using all the latest tools that this wonderful 'inter-web' world has given us.

Labour need to get with it a bit when it comes to online campaigning. Perhaps this'll be a step on the road to accepting the value of blogs? Perhaps we will have a role in this? Should be interesting anyway.

Electoral system biased in Labour's favour? - no comments

I've noticed all sorts of forum posts and articles implying that the UK's electoral system, and now Talk Politics has posted about it.

I've summarised my view in the comments section there, but to summarise once more and, erm, add a bit I've only just remembered:

• First-past-the-post is not itself biased towards Labour. However, it helps regionally concentrated parties/platforms in bad years (Labour in 1983), and hinders them in good years (Labour, however, had greatly broadened their support in 1997).
• Labour-held seats are generally smaller than Tory ones. However, this is not pre-determined. The Tories have the same chance of winning those seats on May 5 as Labour, if only they hadn't neglected urban areas for so long.
• Seats are reallocated all the time to try to equalise the size of the electorate, but not so that the character of the seat is drastically altered.
• The concept of swing works on the basis that the votes on May 5 are merely those from 2001 moved from one pile to another, when in fact all parties start from zero.
• A "swingometer" is a great simplification when there are more than two main parties.
• A swingometer is practically useless when there is organised tactical voting.
• Swing is less and less useful as people become more motivated by local issues. You can counter with "regional" swing figures, but where does it end?

So, to me, all this talk about the Tories needing to win the popular vote by a big margin, just to knock out Labour's huge majority, is nonsense - it doesn't have any basis in fact.

That's not to completely rubbish the work of the psephologists (that's electoral statistics), but you can't get closer to the solution of any problem by making more and more generalisations, and averaging out more and more factors based entirely around past election results, which are no guide to future behaviour.

Still, they make fantastic maps!

Donations - 3 comments

If you'd like to offer donations to ensure the smooth running of Bloggers4Labour (all gratefully received!), please scroll to the bottom of the page and click the PayPal button:



Why am I asking for money? Well, I don't absolutely need it, it's just that I'm running Google ads to get more publicity for the site (which does, after all, help the Labour Party, the blogosphere, and you lot specifically!). They're costing me £5 per day, and I don't intend Bloggers4Labour to just wither away after May 5th - there's five years of possibilities ahead (and a bill for £9131.25!)

What's more, the site is currently hosted in a fairly bargain-basement kind of way. It would be faster (slightly), more robust (definitely), and allow bigger and cleverer things to be done. Just look at BlogLines for examples.

To be honest I'm not expecting anything, but the odd £1 here or there would be great.

Thanks!

Missing Manifesto - 6 comments

Now you've all read and inwardly-digested the Labour 2005 manifesto, what one pledge or promise would you like to add or change to make it just that little bit better?

UK bloggers wake up! - 2 comments

Paul Anderson's article of the same name caught my attention on Friday night, and now it's mysteriously disappeared from his site. As I think there's some validity to it, here it is, courtesy of Google's cache:

This was suposed to be the bloggers' election. In fact, the blog input has been risible. Hardly anyone is posting daily and no one is hitting serious politics post after post. Yup, the campaign has been boring so far - but this is the big opportunty. As Delia would put it: "Let's be having you!"

HTML emails - no comments

Our text digest emails have been cleaned up a lot, and we can now send in HTML format, which looks a whole lot nicer. Enjoy!

Log in to change your email preferences, or to sign up for your daily digest.

Political Survey 2005 - 1 comment

Hat tip to Councillor Bob, who took the latest Election quiz and responded:

Only 1.7% of the population have the same political views as me... and only 2.5% of Labour voters! I hope the 2.5% bother to vote!

It only takes a few minutes and produces vast amounts of statistics, so I just had to give it a go. Here are my archived results if you're curious.

Note the "you are here" on Page 1. I'm pretty much where I expected to be on the horizontal axis (Left-Right), though far higher up the vertical axis (Free Markets) than I'd have expected.

Anyway, when it comes to crime and punishment, Europe, and other transnational issues including immigration and international law:

• 0.9% are significantly to your left
• 5.5% have views about the same as yours
• 93.6% are significantly to your right

Apparently, only 8.2% of Labour voters are in the same boat as me here, and I have more in common with Greens (except for the whole dreadlocks and hemp clothes thing).

Not so happy with being described as "Very right-wing" on "public and private involvement in the economy, international trade, redistributive taxation... and Iraq", as you can imagine.

Though I don't support renationalisation of the railways, don't believe the existing state pension is viable in the future (likewise France and Germany), support Free Trade (a good old Labour position), and (rather late in the day) came round to the need for the Iraq war, I'm also in favour of stronger trade unions and higher personal taxes.

But it seems 92% of the population are to my "left" on this position and I might as well just go off and buy the Daily Telegraph. Wonder what my new friends in the Tory party would think about my position on the unions...

Take the test yourself!

Publicising our news feeds - 3 comments

We're making our list of news feeds available, in OPML format:

OPML (Outline Processor Markup Language) is an XML format for outlines. Originally developed by Radio UserLand as a native file format for an outliner application it has since been adopted for other uses, the most common being to exchange list of RSS feeds between RSS aggregators.

To see the output, click the little logo:

If you can find a use for this, do let us know!

Michael Howard blog - no comments

The coffin-dweller has decided to jump on the blogging bandwagon - or has he? Michael Howard MP purports to be his blog. It's hilarious - reminded me of those Private Eye Secret Diary of John Major books from the early 1990s. I think the word I'm looking for is "pooteresque" (not, in this case, a reference to our own PooterGeek):

I did manage to push home the fact that there is now a clear choice between the Parties - you can choose to spend your £2.50 on around 7,000 words with the Conservatives, or 23,000 words with Labour. You see, I told you Blair was all talk.

It's a big hit in our office, so check it out.

View from America - no comments

Thought we'd had a mention in the US press, but it turned out that someone just clicked one of our Google ads, which are now so hard to avoid. Still the article from the Chicago Sun-Times is interesting in a slightly loopy and completely biased kind of way:

Neither Iraq nor "spin" would be serious enough to damage Blair, however, if his domestic policies had succeeded. He ran in the last two elections on a promise to reform and improve the public services. Money has been poured into them, but they have shown little or no improvement [!]. And this week, we were told why by a leading Blairite minister, John Reid conceded that reforms had not seriously begun until five years after Blair entered office.

Even Reid, however, was not sufficiently reckless [!!] to give the reason: Blair is a small "c" conservative leading a social democrat party in which the second most powerful figure, Finance Minister Gordon Brown, is an unreconstructed left-winger [!!!]. He is not powerful enough to implement left-wing policies, but he can obstruct the market reforms in health and education that Blair proposes.

Unreconstructed left-winger? Well, from a political culture in which many regard Michael Moore as "far-left", I suppose Brown must seem like he wants Lombard Street to run red with the blood of the financiers. But whatever your view of Tony Blair, he can hardly be called a little-C "conservative", having himself singled out that one word for particular contempt.

Anybody else come across similarly eccentric coverage of the Election from across the seas?

New: recent web links - no comments

Something I've added tonight: as well as parsing each blog's news feed so that we can display recent entries in our list, we now scan for web links (URLs), sort them, and gather them together in one place (note that we're careful enough to strip out email addresses, to stop people getting spammed).

Now some feeds don't actually publish links (mainly the RSS ones), but luckily most seem to, which makes things more fun. In the past 48 hours, we've picked up 190 links, from Doctor Who to the Southern Poverty Law Centre to Trailer Trash Queens. And some political ones too!

Let me know if you can think of a better way of displaying this information...

Poster fun - 2 comments

Sorry to take the level of discourse down a level, but it was too tempting :-)

Thanks to Jim at Where There Were No Doors, and to the ubiquitous Tory Poster Generator. Click for full-size version.

Looking smoother - no comments

Hope you've noticed that the item descriptions we show on the web pages are looking better. Gone is the jumble of HTML - now you can see proper links. Hopefully that makes things easier to follow.

Ran out of time to improve the digest emails we send out, but hopefully they can be smartened up too in due course.

The real Alastair Campbell - 2 comments

Sounding somewhat different to his blog (yeah, right), Alastair says the following, in an email to all members:

Well there it is - the Tories have published their manifesto today and all around you can almost hear the country's civil servants asking "how on earth do we turn that into a policy programme for government?"

Thin or what?

But more than that, the Tory "manifesto" is dangerous. Economically dangerous above all. As Tony and Gordon said yesterday, you cannot cut tax and increase spending and reduce borrowing with the same money at the same time.

I remember the agonies we went through in opposition to make sure Labour policies stacked up and the sums added up. It is apparent that Mr Howard and the ludicrous Letwin have shown nothing like the rigour Tony and Gordon did back in 1997.

The Tory manifesto, the thinnest in history, confirms that the Tories intend to fight a totally negative, small bore campaign focusing on a series of negative messages and without even an attempt to put a positive vision for the future. It is a campaign based on fear and grievance. You can see it from their posters and the messages that come pouring out of Mr Howard, his hidden away Shadow Cabinet and "immigrant" Australian campaign managers.

But the Labour Party can still take nothing for granted. The Tories have a lot more money than we do. They have more for posters, more for campaign materials, more for organisation. They have several newspapers led by the vile (interestingly an anagram of evil) Daily Mail willing to pour out free pro-Howard propaganda and ridiculous anti-Labour bile for them.

So we have to use every way we can to get over positive messages about our record and above all our future programme for a third term if we are elected.

Party election broadcasts are a well known way of trying to get over a message during the campaign. Tonight the first is aired. It focuses on our greatest strength, the economy, and does so by recording a series of conversations between Tony and Gordon. They are the two main architects of New Labour and drivers of progress in the last eight years.

Watch it. Get your friends to watch it. I defy anyone who does to say afterwards that Mr Howard and Mr Letwin should take over from them.

Our first party election broadcast goes out tonight, Monday, 11 April:

17:55 (BBC2)
18:55 (BBC1)
18:55 (ITV1)
19:55 (Channel 4)
19:25 (Channel 5)
22:30 (Sky News)

And you can watch it right now at: Labour.org.uk/audiovideo

Best wishes,
Alastair Campbell

So many bloggers... - 4 comments

Here are the latest additions to the pro-Labour blogging family from the past couple of weeks. That takes us to 70, but there must be loads more. What's a sensible target by May 5? 150? Let's see if we can achieve that.

• Henley Labour Party - For Labour Party voters and supporters in this East Oxfordshire Constituency.
• Black Triangle - Weblog of Anthony Cox
• Let's be sensible - Politics and current affairs, but with bits of ethics and philosophy from time to time.
• Stoke Labour Group - The official blog of the City of Stoke-on-Trent Labour Group Leadership.
• Allan Wilson MSP - Working for the people of Cunninghame North.
• What Comes To Pass - The inane wafflings of a Law Student in London.
• A Cloud In Trousers - "Speak not of revolution until you are willing to eat rats to survive, when the revolution comes"
• Recess Monkey - Blogging for an MP.
• Delbert Wilkins
• Anne's Campaign Blog - The Labour candidate for Aberdeen South blogs her campaign.
• Blairite Bob - Political commentary from a new Labour worker bee who feels just *ever* so slightly out of place in Welsh Labour
• Oliver Kamm - Politics, economics and culture.

And some news sites:

• LabourStart - Syndicated trade union news from around the world.
• Election Blog 2005 - The 2005 UK General Election weblog from The Guardian newspaper.

Blair's letter to the Mirror / Graphology - no comments

TONY Blair today writes a personal letter to millions of Daily Mirror readers with the plea: "Keep Britain moving forward".

In a passionate message on the day he fired the starting gun for a May 5 election, the PM says a Tory victory would be a disastrous lurch backwards.

Full article here. In my post at Hove Labour, yesterday, I noted Tory candidate Boles' use of a handwritten letter, and wondered what a graphologist might make of him.

It seems Lady Muck has had our Tony's handwriting analysed, and presents the conclusions. Here's an interesting bit:

Straight-across T-stem: "Tony is a practical person whose goals are planned and down to earth. He finds joy in anticipation and planning. Tony basically feels good about himself. He feels he has the ability to achieve anything he sets his mind to. He has enough self-confidence to leave a bad situation."

Email digests ready - no comments

Yep, digests are ready - sign up now.

Make sure you're registered, then log in and click the "Email digest options" link. You can choose what time of day or night you want your email, and whether you want the full thing (with summaries, descriptions, et al.), or just the links for the posts.

Remember, you're only getting one email per day - we're not going to bombard you with junk. Obviously there's no charge.

As a guide to the size of email you can expect, a "complete" email for the past 24 hours contains 72 posts, and weighs in at 100 KB - biggish if you're on dial-up, but then there's plenty of stuff to read. By contrast, the "links-only" email was around 24 KB.

Board already - no comments

My 1996 vintage Labour "estate agent's" sign, posing in my kitchen prior to being stuck up in my front window (under cover of darkness).



Should add some colour to my street!

Popularity - no comments

Cool, we beat our record at StatCounter today! Thanks, all, for the links.

I won't say exactly how many hits (you'll laugh!), but it's very encouraging anyway.

Daily digests: update - no comments

The daily digests email facility is coming along nicely. All I need do now is update the members' page to provide the new options.

Should be up and running by the time Tony pops by the Palace for a cup of tea and a Hobnob.

Coming soon: daily digests - no comments

Thanks to Jonathan for the idea. If people think it's interesting, and then once I've added the facility, you'll be able to receive a daily digest of all Bloggers4Labour member site posts from the past 24 hours. You'll be able to choose what time of day it'll arrive, and whether you want summaries of each article or just the title and a link.

How does that sound?

The first step is to get yourself a username and password so you can log in to our Members page - that's where you will be able to set your preferences when the facility is added.

In the meantime, the Members page tells you how you can display our list of bloggers ('live') on your own site, in a variety of formats.

Blogging record - no comments

Just noticed that 122 posts were written by our pro-Labour bloggers in the past 48 hours.

OK, that does include a few news articles, but it's still fantastic going. No fewer than 29 bloggers posted during this period - that's also a record for us.

Hopefully we'll smash these records when the Election is called.