Posts Tagged ‘Labour Party’

The Queen’s Speech, which took place last Wednesday, went as we predicted with proposals announced on fiscal responsibility, financial services, constitutional reform, education and energy amongst others. The Speech was short and to the point with only 13 bills and 2 draft bills announced and no announcements on Health (one of the largest Government departments), immigration or MPs’ expenses.

The Speech was touted as being the most political for a decade, as was to be expected with a General Election taking place next year and once the Queen had left Parliament Gordon Brown and David Cameron drew the battle lines. The Prime Minster defended the speech saying that it showed that the Government was ’standing up for Britain’ and criticised the Conservatives over their inheritance tax policy, whilst the Leader of the Opposition responded by calling the Speech ‘half-baked’ and a ‘waste of the country’s time’. These soundbites, like the contents of the Speech itself, were not particularly surprising.

There is now a period of reflection in the House of Commons as the Speech will be debated for no fewer than 6 days. With that in mind we gathered together leading parliamentarians to see what they made of the speech:

Dr Des Turner MP

Labour Member of Parliament for Brighton Kemptown

“Given that the Parliamentary Session will be shortened by the General Election this was a very ambitious Queen’s Speech, containing very real and useful legislation.

I totally disagree with those who think it is simply part of the Election manifesto - such claims are very wide of the mark.

These measures are very important and legislation like the care for the elderly Bill are part of a long overdue revolution for people who are in the latter part of their lives.”

Chloe Smith MP

Conservative Member of Parliament for Norwich North

“For me the Queen’s Speech was a mixed bag. For the most part it was all about the Labour Party serving itself rather than the country. It was a case of politics not Government.

There were a number of measures that simply served to create the next Labour election manifesto and you have to ask yourself if these measures are so important then why have they taken 12 years to be implemented? Furthermore, a number of measures were policies that the Government should be getting on with anyway rather than legislating on.

Having said that there was one measure that my constituents might welcome, which was the announcement on flood defences.”

Lord Avebury

Liberal Democrat Spokesperson for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs, Spokesperson for the Home Office

“The Queen’s Speech has rightly been criticised for pretending that so many Bills can be passed in the few days of Parliamentary sittings before the 2010 general election. When there is no chance of getting most of them into law it is farcical.

I hoped there would be more realism but this is obviously just for the shop window. Nobody would guess that six months from now a new government will have to make huge spending cuts.

The absence of any mention of a referendum on electoral reform, widely supported in all three parties, is a serious disappointment.”

The Tweetminster webpage, where Conservative MPs are outnumbered by their Labour counterparts

As a newcomer to Twitter, I can’t help wondering why there are only 66 MPs signed up to a social media site that they could use daily to stay in touch with their constituents?

More importantly I find it bizarre that of the 66 MPs on Twitter there are more than 4 times as many Labour MPs (over 40) as Conservatives (9) on Twitter.

Why is this?

The Conservative Party website is full of videos, YouTube links, blogs and audio messages and there are a couple of extremely successful Conservative blogs like Order Order and Conservative Home (although not directly connected to the central Conservative Party). David Cameron has packed his Shadow Cabinet with media savvy figures like Jeremy Hunt - founder of Hotcourses - and spent the last 4 years spearheading Webcameron and the Conservative Wall - innovative uses of interactive media.

So why are they so behind on Twitter?

I am going to put forward a series of hypotheses that could explain this mismatch:

• 1. Proportion - I thought at first that because there are more Labour MPs in Parliament it could seem like more are tweeting when the proportions are the same. But there are 349 Labour MPs compared with 192 Conservative MPs, yet there are only 9 Conservative tweeters and over 40 Labour tweeters. In terms of proportion this means only 5% of Conservative MPs tweet whereas 11% of Labour MPs do - a clear Labour margin.
• 2. Age - The Conservative Party has often had a reputation as a party of older more traditional members, which could be seen as a reason for the Conservative Party not embracing Twitter. But as of the 2005 election Labour MPs were on average three years older than the average Conservative MP at 52 and 49 respectively. So age alone cannot be a factor.
• 3. Occupation -Background could be a more important factor than age as the Conservative Party has a far higher proportion of MPs from traditional professions such as the law, business and finance as compared with the Labour Party’s greater number of teachers, lecturers and political organisers. This may reflect a greater background of engagement in modern media amongst the Labour Party as compared with the legal and financial careers of Conservative MPs.
• 4. Constituency Impact - But for me, the most redolent reason for why Conservative MPs can blog but not tweet is that whilst they are slowly seeing how blogs can help them to stay in touch with their constituents, they cannot understand Twitter’s benefits. In rural Conservative seats in Cumbria, Sussex and Hampshire there is most likely less frequency of creative and media jobs and less engagement with social media than the urban constituencies like Manchester, London and Birmingham where Labour MPs dominate. The greater number of students, teenagers and 20s-30s working in careers that use social media in Labour constituencies makes Twitter more relevant and usable in campaigning as Boris Johnson has showed as Mayor of London -a constituency with a modern and creative media hub.

These are my main thoughts on this twitter conundrum; but to get to the bottom of this question I am going to conduct a survey of MPs and people involved in political communications who may have a better idea of why there are less Conservatives than Labour MPs on Twitter.  With this in mind I will blog again in a fortnight and outline my findings on the big question:

Where are all the Conservative (MP) Tweeters?

So Gordon Brown survives to fight on and by all accounts his performance at the Parliamentary Labour Party (PLP) meeting has strengthened the support of the Party’s MPs for their leader.

This doesn’t mean though that Brown is safe, it doesn’t mean that the threats of a leadership challenge have ended, rather that he has bought time - perhaps until the autumn to demonstrate that he can make the most of his Premiership and attempt to take the fight back to the Conservatives.

Gordon Brown was by all accounts very candid at the meeting and admitted to weaknesses which he said he would work at improving as well as concentrating on his strengths. This seems to have gone down well with the PLP.

Some members of the PLP have made the point following the meeting that Brown is as good a leader as they can hope for in the short term and although they accept that under Brown Labour is unlikely to win the next General Election, changing the leader now would make little, if any, difference.

This does beg the question, has Labour essentially given up hope of winning the next Election? With the results from the local elections and especially from the Euro elections in which Labour were pushed into third place and the latest polling figures, it certainly seems so.

What has Gordon Brown left to pull out of the bag to turn the tide back in Labour’s favour? He has effectively promoted Peter Mandelson to the position of Deputy Prime Minister, he has shuffled his pack for probably the last time before the Election and he has established a number of new Cabinet Committees, designed to input into policy direction.

Is this enough? Time will tell.

In the meantime, against a background of some of the poorest economic indicators for some time against the Government and what appeared to be an increasing opposition to Gordon Brown continuing as PM, this demonstrates that it is not particularly easy, nor straightforward to remove a sitting Prime Minister.