Posts Tagged ‘politics’

With the resignation of the Speaker,  the blood-letting has formally begun.

Current and former ministers, Committee Chairs, backbenchers have been drawn into the quagmire. Even the few who have been deemed to have been Saints such as Ed Miliband, Adam Afriyie, Alan Johnson, Vince Cable due to their low running costs have all been tarnished and Parliament itself is being referred to as the Moat Parliament or the Manure Parliament. But the Speaker has been the first to officially fall on his sword.

It is fascinating to look at how the expenses story has evolved in the press. According to Assistant Editor, Benedict Brogan on last week’s Question Time, The Telegraph has had the disks for at least a month and have had a team of 25 journalists plugging through the millions of receipts and documents.

At first the public was simply disgusted by shocking story was but as the media continued to bay for blood, the public have been whipped up into a frenzy with the sleaze story to end all sleaze stories.

The blood-letting will continue and we will witness further infighting as a number of MPs scramble to get the position of Poison Chalice, sorry I mean Speaker.

Who will it be? Will it be old guard, Sir George Young, Sir Alan Haselhurst? Will it be the Lib-Dems turn, Vince Cable, Sir Menzies Campbell? Will it be a fresh face like John Bercow? Or could they go with a temporary Speaker who could hold the House in order until the next general election, someone like Ann Widdecombe?  Or will it be someone from complete left field?

I’m not going to discuss the merits of each - that will be played out in the media in the coming days and weeks. Loyalties will be questioned, reputations tarnished, dirty little secrets aired.

But without question, in living memory, never has a choice of Speaker been so important in the eyes of the public and this is a decision that Parliament has to get right.

Everyone knows how Barack Obama and Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean, have been able to harness Web 2.0 to create a digital grassroots campaign which has been significantly responsible to wining the White House. My question is, will this digital revolution ever be harnessed by the UK political machine?

The US Government has, to a certain extent, already jumped on the twitter bandwagon and it’s only likely to increase come January 20^th under the Obama Presidency. But, what about the UK? Number 10 has recently rebuilt its website to make it far more social media friendly, including twitter, flickr and youtube applications, as well as a whole host of bookmarking sites, which means someone can see the potential of social media outreach. But, at the same time it is all fairly basic. It seems to be a “we should give this a try”, rather than being a part of an overall strategy.

As far as I can tell, the only twittering going on comes from the Prime Minister’s office, along with David Cameron, Nick Clegg, a few other MPs and their respective parties, Hazel Blears and the Department of Communities and the Foreign and Commonwealth Office but not much more. DFID has recently set-up a blogging site written by on-the-ground staff in the UK and abroad and the Our NHS, Our Future site has a blog written by Lord Darzi, although it hasn’t been updated since July and David Miliband actively blogs of the FCO website along with other FCO staff.

Other Government departments also have online tools aimed at online engagement, but again, it all feels ad hoc. For instance, the DFID blog is on a completely different hosting address to the normal DFID site, so if you didn’t know it was there, you’d struggle to find it.

Is the Government harnessing digital and social media as well as it can?

The question can be asked of private blogs focusing on politics. There are thousands of blogs from journalists, pundits, firms all like this one, which discuss the whole gambit of Government; policies, polls, reform, rumours and the list goes on. But, what about sites like the Drudge Report, which is famous enough to have been mentioned on the West Wing number of times and has had an undeniable effect on US Political Communications. It has also been around so long, the Observer recently listed it as being “on the way out.” The UK blogger sites just aren’t quite the same. This is possibly why they aren’t seen as an issue to political communication aficionados.

The UK simply doesn’t do it as well as the USA, yet what Westminster has to realise is, one blogging site, with one story, with one influential reader, could change everything and the UK political world could have to completely change its style of communications with it. After all, it was Drudge who broke the Clinton-Lewinsky Scandal.