Posts Tagged ‘westminster’

The 13th Queen’s Speech by a Labour Government (and possibly the last for a while) takes place in the House of Commons today.

The Queen will set out the Government’s policies for the forthcoming few months before the next General Election. In common with the past few years, the content of the Speech has been substantially leaked in advance so there should be no real surprises.

The legislative agenda is likely to include Bills on Education and Families, Crime and Security, Social Care, Energy and Health.

The timings for the Speech are as follows:

Royal Procession to arrive at the Palace of Westminster at 11.15am.

Queen’s Speech will take place at 11.30am (approx) the Queen will read the speech from the throne in the House of Lords

Motion for the Humble Address will commence at 2.30pm in the House of Commons and 3.30pm in the House of Lords

Throughout the day we will keep you updated on the Bills as they are outlined.

The Government has published its Template Twitter Strategy for Government Departments (even more impressively, it is available for download on a Scribd page), suggesting to civil servants to begin tweeting and explaining how to do it, with the ultimate aim of improving public engagment.

The document is a really interesting, well put-together twitter template. It sets out pros and cons, twitter stats, a glossary and a reasonably significant list of influential twitter uses including journos, departments, MPs. It also has devised twitter objectives and metrics, which I’m sure will spur plenty of debate amongst bloggers and tweeters.

Written by Neil Williams (a.k.a @neillyneil), a self admitted “Web strategy geek at the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills,”  the document advises civil servants, particularly those from the digital comms teams, to tweet on departmental campaigns, news releases, ministerial announcements, highlighting content on other social media platforms such as YouTube and even asking and answering questions.

Amazingly, this all means that civil servants will be crawling out of the shadows of Whitehall and will have a face, albeit a digital one.  By encouraging interaction, there will be a transparency and two-way communication that, possibly, has never existed in Whitehall before.

Tom Watson MP, the first blogging Parliamentarian and avid social media nut, was also on the Today programme on Radio 4, spruiking the benefits of social media and, in particular Twitter, as a method of communication and interaction.

Tom Watson also made the point that many old mandarins still get their secretaries to print out the mandarin’s emails for review.

MPs are similar; we are currently surveying Parliamentarians and politicos about the use of twitter in Westminster.  There are indeed MPs like Tom Watson, who was among a number of MPs on the Independent’s list of influential parliamentarian twitter, who are actively involved on the blogosphere and many of those listed have actively participated in our survey. But the truth is many still don’t get it and don’t see the point.

But surely, strategies like this show that social media has been adopted by the main stream  and the idea that social media is just for kids, computer geeks and a small sector of society is no longer true.  The powers that be have recognised the revolution will be digitalised and they have no choice but to get on board.

If you are interested in this issue and you would like to take our survey on the use of twitter in Westminster and Whitehall, we would more than appreciate your comments.  http://bit.ly/10sf8B

John Prescott's twitter page

I was just pointed to a really interesting gallery on The Independent’s website titled Twitter’s speedy move to the centre of politics. The gallery is compiled with the help from the team at Tweetminister, which is a really useful resource that lists all tweeting MPs and Prospective Parliamentary Candidates (PPCs).

What I really find interesting about it and is obviously the point of the gallery, is the evolution of twitter use by Parliamentarians. Initially, when I first joined twitter around 18 months ago, I think there were only one, maybe two MPs tweeting. Now according to the Independent, there are at least 66 MPs tweeting - 10% of the Commons. What’s even more exciting is that the vast majority of those MPs are active tweeters. Sure you have MPs such as @HarrietHarman who hasn’t tweeted since May and there is Shahid Malik (@DewsburyMP) who has never posted, but you also have avid users such as Kerry McCarthy [Lab] - Bristol East with 2623 updates, Jo Swinson [LD] - East Dunbartonshire with 1503 and of course Tom Watson [Lab] - West Bromwich East with 2368. There are apparently also 13 Ministers tweeting away.

Some MPs have even got so involved they have tinted their profiles green in support of the Iranian protestors. This may be a slightly questionable in terms of foreign policy decisions, but the fact is these MPs actively involved in the political social media revolution.

Most surprisingly, possibly in the majority of cases, it is actually them tweeting and not a researcher hidden away in Portcullis house as proven by @JoSwinson who tweets from the Chamber. And they reply if you contact them.

So the moral here is that there is a growing awareness of the power of twitter and social media in Westminster and this is surely going to grow. Twitter, facebook and other tools are becoming more and more legitimate ways to contact and engage with MPs and other key decision makers. I can only guess about what is to come especially in the lead up to the General Election

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.