Silicon Snake Oil (or how data analytics didn't really win it for anyone)

'Twas ever thus....

Cambridge Analytica is not the first political technology vendor to made big, unproven claims about its abilities. But we live in the age of silicon snake oil. There are millions to be made selling gullible investors and clients on mumbo-jumbo.

And right now it suits the political left - in the USA and the UK - to see that 'silicon snake oil' as some sort of darkly sinister plot to undermine democracy. The truth - despite the ever more scary stuff we see from documentaries like 'The Great Hack' - is that, just as ride-sharing disrupts taxi services and Airbnb hotels, social media disrupts the established norms of political communication, norms that said messages from political campaigns to the public are mediated through TV and newspapers.

As Micah Sifry (from who I've taken the quotation above) reminds us:

When it comes to voters’ decisions about their choice of candidate, most forms of paid political persuasion, including TV ads, online ads, mailers, phone calls, and door-knocking, have no discernible effect in terms of changing people’s minds. That’s the conclusion of a careful meta-review of 49 field experiments all looking at general election campaigns, published by political scientists Joshua Kalla and David Broockman in the American Political Science Review in 2018

We told you so (or rather I was told way back in 1982 before all this Internet malarkey existed) - political campaigning is nearly all about finding people who say they'll support you and getting them to vote. We repeatedly told activists - 'don't waste your time trying to persuade somebody on the doorstep - if they're arguing with you they probably won't be voting for you, get a VI and skedaddle' (or words to that effect). Later on we used profiling and targeting so as to hopefully find more people who say they'll vote for us and spend less time knocking on the doors or ringing the phones of people who won't.

If you're one of those people who think some sort of sinister international cabal is responsible for manipulating thick people into voting for things you don't agree with then you are every bit as thick as those people you consider so stupid they had their minds switched 180 degrees by a Facebook ad. What's happening is that data analytics businesses like Cambridge Analytica - "all hat and no cattle" as one Ted Cruz advisor put it - are trying to exploit the fixed belief that our minds (or rather, other people's minds) are peculiarly persuadable by one particular form of communication, advertising. It's true that advertisers spend a lot of time thinking about what message their consumers want to hear but they also know that, in most markets, the money is best invested in reminding your existing customers what a fantastic choice they made. The same goes for political communications.

There's a quite pervasive idea that political communication should take place in a sort of virtual arena where every voter receives the same information. This, we're told is because targeted communications somehow corrupt democracy by giving Mary a message about animal welfare and Steve a message about hospitals especially if Steve won't see the message Mary gets and vice versa. There's a deal of discussion about 'dog whistles' and hints at sinister subliminal messages. As political parties quickly find out, they are just like consumer brands where sustaining the brand and motivating the consumer is the primary function of communication. What targeting does is to allow the party to talk to Mary about the things that are important to Mary and to connect those interests to the party's programme. But the starting point here is that Mary is more likely than not to vote for that party - if she isn't the communication is mostly wasted.

This is why Cambridge Analytica didn't win anybody anything with its psychological targeting - it's not very effective:

The Cruz campaign stopped using its data. Chris Wilson, the campaign’s director of research, analytics, and digital strategy, discovered that more than half the voters CA had identified as Cruz supporters in Oklahoma actually backed other candidates

So next time you watch a slick TV documentary or read a long 'join-the-dots' screed in The Observer or the New York Times, remember that, for all that CA might be sinister, linked to shadowy dark money, what they sold was the data analytics version of the quack doctor's patent cure all.

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Why Remain lost (redux)

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Can I start firstly by saying this is a marketing view not a political one (although inevitably there'll be some politics). And secondly that Remain lost the referendum, Leave didn't win it. The campaign to stay in the European Union went from a secure opinion poll lead at the start of 2016 to losing the referendum six months later. At the outset of the campaign - which really started back in January not at the official campaign launch - Remain (or Stronger In) held all the cards. The campaign could count on the support of the three mainstream party leaders, most of the established names in politics, business, academia and science. Plus a reliable stream of celebrities happy to smile at the camera and proclaim "Stronger In".

The 'Stronger In' message - immigration aside - should also have been a winner. Thousands of foot soldiers to be recruited from the direct beneficiaries of EU members, from organisations receiving grants, from the ranks of universities. Big business, local government and the 'third sector' could be relied on to do the right thing in getting that message across.

So what went wrong? Well before some analysis from cleverer marketers than me, I'd like to share a couple of anecdotes (or qualitative analysis if you prefer).

Here in Cullingworth, the Village Hall decided to hold a referendum debate - they'd sounded out some folk in the village who all seemed keen and got a time and date (the venue, of course, would be the hall). A call to the local MP provided a Leave speaker pretty quickly and the Hall then contacted Stronger In - firing an email off to the address on that organisation's website. Nothing. No response at all. The good folk from the Hall chased - still nothing. I messaged the chief executive of the campaign, the Stronger In press office and another In twitter account. No response. Eventually, on the eve of the event, we got a limp phone message: "have you got a speaker?"

As it happened, other avenues had got us a speaker (thank you to Richard Corbett MEP for stepping up). But had we not used those avenues the event wouldn't have happened. The Stronger In campaign had failed at the very first hurdle of any campaign - not responding to enquiries. And, while Will Straw and the Stronger In press office were having a fun spat on Twitter with the much better organised (if smaller and poorer) Leave campaign, they also failed to respond to a request - from a non-partisan organisation - for campaign help.

The second anecdote is about public perception of what the vote was about. I'm sat in the sitting room of some local members - we were actually there to talk about the May local elections - and the referendum, perhaps inevitably, came up. Now these members are both elderly - 70s maybe even 80s - and they spoke about their doubts. Not selfishly but from the perspective of their children and grandchildren - "this is about twenty, thirty, forty years in the future - what sort of Britain we want for them" was the driver of their doubt. Now I don't know how this couple voted but I do know that the Stronger In campaign completely missed their perspective - the public campaign (where it was coherent) was entirely about the next few years.

I picked up this time perception time and time again but the Remain campaign stayed trapped in its short-termism - there was no message that answered my members' question: "what would a Stronger In Britain be like in twenty, thirty or forty years". Other than a sort of grandfatherly (at best) "it won't be good, you know - I wouldn't do it". And this short-termism continues after the Brexit vote - West Yorkshire Combined Authority in a report on 'Brexit implications' described 'long term' as 2017-2018.

I commented before on how the advertising folk - and Remain had access to all the top agencies, a deep well of marketing knowledge - saw the campaign as a shambles, without any positive message and focused more on personalities than on that message. Well here's another comment - focused more on tactical communications issues - from Mike Hind:

It was almost as if Remain actively wanted to exclude you if you read the Daily Express. Tepid offerings of business information and hesitant requests to support them if you’d “like to” hardly spoke of a passion to mobilise people who are generally more turned on by a direct call to arms. It didn’t work for me — and I was a financial contributor to the campaign. A despairing one.

Hind looks at web messaging, brand development and the lack of any apparent strategy. But this paragraph gets to the core of it - there was no message for the elderly couple sat in a Yorkshire sitting room worrying about their grandchildren. Instead Stronger In figures spent time painting these likely (but not certain) Leave voters as if they were pariahs - racist xenophobes, Little Englanders, selfish, ill-educated, lacking in understanding. A communications strategy designed to reassure the core thirty- and forty-something professional audience of Stronger In not a strategy to have a conversation with people in places like Cullingworth who hadn't made their minds up.

As I started out saying - Stronger In, or Remain, began the campaign with all the advantages, all the expertise and the basis of an effective organisation. And blew it. On the evening of polling day - a few minutes after the polls had shut, the BBC interviewed Ed Miliband. It doesn't matter what the MP for Doncaster North said in the interview, it matters where it was conducted - from London. Miliband wasn't where he would have been most effective - in his constituency where he's known, influential and probably liked.

The problem now is that those who campaigned to remain a member of the EU are compounding their error. They're still preferring to paint Leave voters as thick, ill-educated, oafish bigots rather than begin the job of listening to those people. Analyses of voting that confirm this view are shared. Bad news of any sort is leapt on and spread around - whether its reports of xenophobic attacks (do note that West Yorkshire police say there's no post-referendum increase in such attacks) or some snippet of economic news, mostly opinion or anecdote, that confirms the Remain campaign's predictions of short-term doom and gloom.

Right now there's a peace to win. And it won't be won by portraying half the nation as stupid, bigoted, ignorant and selfish. It will be won by presenting the case most of us support - Britain as an outward-looking, co-operative, creative nation that's up for trade, intellectual exchange and, yes, sensibly managed immigration.

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Why 'Stronger In' lost - the ad man's tale

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In a close political contest and especially one conducted across the whole nation, campaign tactics and execution matter. Which makes this report on the 'Stronger In' advertising and messaging in Campaign very important:

But, without doubt, one of the key problems was that the Remain camp was determined to take a negative stance. MacLennan says his agency was clear on the need for a positive message. "We said don’t try to cower people into submission – encourage them to see the positives," he insists. "We came up with a strategy based around ‘Don’t leave it, lead it’ but they didn’t run with it."

James Murphy, chief executive of Adam & Eve/DDB, says his agency had also wanted to focus on positive messaging, presenting Remain as offering the best of both worlds (inside the EU but with special status): "But that didn’t fit with the prevailing feeling in the camp that the Scottish referendum and the general election had been won by emphasising risk."

So counter to the agencies’ recommendations, Project Fear became the linchpin of what was a confused and disparate strategy. While the Leave campaigners were able to talk up all the good things about quitting the EU, Stronger In’s agenda was almost unrelentingly negative and undynamic.

Now there's a disconnect here between our understanding of what works in political advertising and how we frame more regular brand communications. In simple terms we think negative political messaging - Project Fear - works whereas we believe negatively founded messaging causes long-term brand damage in regular consumer advertising. From an outsider's perspective the 'Stronger In' campaign had a simple (and fundamentally strong) strategy - secure endorsement for 'remain' from respected experts, commenters and celebrities and stress the value we get from EU membership. What seems to have happened is that this strategy was run from 10 Downing Street while the 'Stronger In' campaign team floundered about essentially directionless:

"We were simply called upon to provide creative window-dressing, not political strategy. And because Stronger In had no political strategy, we had nothing to say. Of course we struggled to get our message across, because the real art is working out the message in the first place and we weren’t allowed to help with that."

The Campaign report talks of divisions, suspicions and an inability to collaborate - coupled with the lack of focus that led to 24 people round the table deciding on the execution of strategy. 'Stronger In' had no message besides 'stronger in' itself - there was no effort to try and provide a context or rationale to that positioning, to explain in language people would understand just how we might be 'stronger in'. Instead 'stronger in' was defined in terms of us being 'weaker out' - in other words negatively. And people - or rather the people who mattered, the undecided voters - didn't believe that message or trust those proffering ever more shrill reasons why leaving the EU was bad.

In contrast (and for all its failings of strategy) Vote Leave - perhaps more by luck than judgement - hit upon a message that was both positive and also flexible enough to accommodate the range of views and expectations of people considering a leave vote. "Take Control" they said - positive, telling people they have power and agency, and hard for 'Stronger In' to refute or challenge. Alongside this, the media (and 'Stronger In' who should have known better) embraced the term 'Brexit' meaning that leaving became a thing, had a brand people could use.

There were other mistakes - once Vote Leave had adopted a red and white livery it was pretty dumb of Labour In to produce material in red and white. In the fleeting moment between picking the leaflet from the mat and putting it into the bin or the glimpse of a poster as we drive past, you need to capture attention - it seems that Labour couldn't bring themselves to use Stronger In's blue and white with the result that, at best, a confused message was presented to the voters it targeted.

As the disappointed 'remain' voters emerge blinking into England's watery sunshine, they're beginning - too late, way too late - to construct a positive message about the EU. One about personal links, shared history, economic co-operation and our voice in the world. It might have been a different result if that had been the message prior to 23 June. Instead we got a parade of the great and good spreading doom and gloom and a persistent sub-text that anyone voting leave - or thinking of voting leave - was a narrow-minded, xenophobic, racist bigot. It's really no surprise given this barrage that people took advantage of the polling booth's calm to stick two fingers up at those elites who painted such a negative picture of English voters.

I am, of course, pleased. But it could have been a very different result if 'Stronger In' had actually tried to explain why we would actually be 'stronger in'. And as a former Ad agency Account Planning Director and a pretty experienced political campaigner, it's clear to me that 'Stronger In' had every advantage in this campaign but failed entirely in using that advantage. Whatever the politics of this, 'Stronger In' - perhaps from complacency, maybe from lack of direction, or even arrogance - threw the referendum win away.

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The two referendum campaigns.

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I got a call from the woman who runs Denholme Elders, a support group for older people in this village perched on top of the South Pennines. They'd been discussing what they wanted to do and had decided they wanted someone to talk to them about the forthcoming EU referendum - could I oblige.

I obliged and set out to give as balanced a presentation about the issues, for and against, as I could. I think I did a passing fair job and I got a little confirmation after about three-quarters of an hour when one gentleman said something like "OK Simon but how are you going to vote?"

It was an interesting hour where some, shall we say, pretty robust views were expressed in that 'do you really think I give a damn' manner that anyone working with the elderly will know. What was striking was that these old people weren't thinking selfishly about their circumstances but rather were asking questions about the sort of country their children and grandchildren would live in. They asked about jobs, welfare benefits, crime and immigration. And they were pretty universally appalled by the lack of seriousness and substance in the rhetoric of the two national campaigns.

Anyone whose sole appraisal of this referendum campaign is through the slogans of Vote Leave or Stronger In - as well as the writings of a host of media experts, bloggers and pundits - would despair at what has become of British politics. An avalanche of half-truths, insults, personal attacks and patronising condescension - plus a sort of proxy war over who succeeds David Cameron as leader of the Conservative Party - has buried the real debate. And, as I saw in Denholme, there is a real debate.

During the first (and slightly quieter) part of the campaign, we had local elections here in Bradford. This meant that we spoke with perhaps a thousand people. A good number of these pushed aside our plea to talk about why they needed a Conservative councillor to ask about the referendum. Some had made their mind up but most hadn't and wanted to explore the issues. This wasn't from a 'please tell me how to vote' perspective but rather a conversation, the sort of engagement you'd have with friends or colleagues.

I've enjoyed this aspect of the referendum because most people know they've been entrusted with a very significant decision and are taking that responsibility seriously. Even last night one person was saying 'I'm voting out but I really want to hear the in case one more time to be sure.' This sort of engagement is in marked contrast to the scaremongering, divisive national campaigns - no-one's falling out, they're just trying to decide what they'll do on Thursday.

For me, after a lifetime in politics - I joined the Conservative Party in 1976 - it is affirmation of two things. Firstly that, given the responsiblity, people can and do take political decision-making seriously and can be trusted. And secondly that our current system, dominated by a London-based media and London-based politicians, does not deserve those people's trust and support. It's not just the familiar 'Westminster bubble' line but something more profound, it's a complete disconnection from the real lives, worries, loves and concerns of those people. Except when they can patronise them as some sort of victim, as vulnerable, or as people these caring politicians can do things do - most often in the form of telling them to stop something (eating burgers, vaping, smoking, drinking, telling jokes).

I saw a tweet - I think is was from the writer and journalist, Gaby Hinsliff - talking about the bitterness of the referendum campaign and the likely bitterness of the aftermath. And this is true, if your world is the world of the London media and London politics. Out here in the sticks people will simply get up on Friday morning and go to work, take the dog for a walk, look after the grandchildren, pop to the shops - do the sort of things they'd do on any other Friday morning. There might be a little disappointment if their vote was for the losing side or pleasure if for the winning option. But there'll be no bitterness - except maybe a sense that our national politics was shown to be nasty, selfish, short-term and consescendingly righteous.

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Divestment doesn't work (but then we knew that)

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The economists Harrison Hong and Marcin Kacperczyk found that sin stocks outperform other stocks by 2.5 per cent per year. This has even resulted in a niche industry: for instance, the Barrier Fund, formerly known as the Vice Fund, is a “sin-vestor” mutual fund that exclusively invests in companies that are significantly involved in alcohol, tobacco, gambling, or defense. It has beaten the S. & P. 500 by an average of nearly two percentage points per year since 2002. By divesting from unethical companies, “ethical” investors may effectively transfer money to opportunists like the Barrier Fund, who will likely spend it less responsibly than their “ethical” counterparts.

It's not just that those sin stocks outperform the market but that divestment campaigns actually contribute to this outperformance. As we discovered in Bradford last week, this doesn't stop self-appointed campaigners virtue-signalling by proposing (at no loss to themselves of course) pension funds pull out from those "sin stocks".

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Campaign hustings and the hierarchy of equalities

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Back in 2001 I stood for parliament in the lovely constituency of Keighley and Ilkley. I didn't win but then not many Conservatives did win that year. During the course of the campaign the candidates were invited to a hustings organised by the two largest mosques in the town. This meeting, held at Victoria Hall, was segregated with women in a separate room adjacent to the main hall which was full of men - plus Anne Cryer the Labour candidate. I recall a slight discomfort at this blatant segregation but, having been involved in Bradford politics, I'd been along to many a meeting where the audience was entirely male. Added to this was a slight annoyance that Mrs Cryer could go and speak directly to the women whereas I was not permitted to do so.

I say this by way of context for talking about the Labour rally in Birmingham and about wider issues relating to campaigns in the UK's Muslim communities. In one respect the audience pictured represents progress - a decade ago it is likely that such a meeting would have had no women present (unless one or more of the candidates addressing the event was female) - but from another perspective it reveals that context is everything in political campaigns. And the context here is that Labour's success in inner city Birmingham depends, to a large extent, on the Muslim vote which means that people who would usually be quick to pounce on misogyny can wave away criticism of gender segregation because of the 'cultural' context.

Imagine what would be the response had one of those Labour candidates, instead of sitting like bored lumps on the platform, had confronted the organiser and insisted that the de facto segregation end, made the point of sitting with those women or invited men to intermingle. It may not be such an issue once the challenge is laid down - I went to the launch of a Conservative campaign in Bradford East where men and women sat intermixed (until it came to eating when they were separate again which I didn't understand).

The unconfronted truth here is that, for all the efforts of some women, too many Muslim men remain deeply uncomfortable with the reality of women's equality. I recall speech after speech from Imran Hussein, Bradford's current Council Deputy Leader, where he shouted that 'we' (by which he mean the Council leadership I guess) take equalities seriously - 'it's not just a tick box exercise' he would exclaim. Yet the truth is that, when Imran speaks of equalities, he has a hierarchy of sensitivity that has race and faith at the top and gender, disability, age and sexual preference lower down the pecking order.

This isn't because Imran is a sexist homophobe - I know him well enough to be sure he isn't - but because the realities of politics in Bradford makes some equalities issues more 'in your face' than others.

When Bradford's Corporate Scrutiny Committee looked at the Council's 'Equalities Action Plan' the most striking thing about the report was that it didn't mention LGBT issues except in the list of protected characteristics under the Equalities Act. Which isn't to say that the Council does nothing about these matters but rather that the dominant equalities issues - the priorities for our Labour politicians - relate to race and faith because this is where they are being challenged (indeed this sense of racial and religious victimhood, and especially the latter, is the absolute essence of George Galloway's pitch to voters).

None of this is to suggest that prejudice against Muslims doesn't exist - I don't know a single Muslim who hasn't experienced such attitudes - but it is to say that, if we believe sexism and homophobia to be a problem, we need to confront these too. And if such attitudes are too common in the Muslim community then it behooves politicians who position themselves as champions of equalities to challenge those prejudices - especially when they have the privilege to be from that community.

The irony here is that three of the world's biggest Muslim countries - Pakistan, Bangladesh and Indonesia - have elected women as leaders, so there is clearly no essential obstacle to female participation. I suspect it just takes a little bit of guts to tell event organisers that there won't be any segregation. This doesn't end deeply rooted sexist views about the role of men and women within a given community - we've had fifty years of women's liberation campaigns in the UK and we still see examples of cringeworthy sexism almost daily - but it does begin to question the acceptance of gender segregation and entrenched homophobia within institutions within those communities.

And the place to start for us politicians is with those things we absolutely control - our own events, meetings and campaigns.

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On the marketing of politics...

In the 1950s, with the expansion of television into every household, mass marketing was born. Clever blokes at companies making what became known as fmcg (fast moving consumer goods) found that they could pull customers into demanding brands using TV to advertise bold, brash and colourful brands.

Before this time marketing was as much directed to the shopkeeper as to the consumer. What marketers did was get the shop to display the brand and, in many cases, provide a financial incentive for the store to push the brand to shoppers. If you want to understand how this works, look at how pharmaceuticals marketing works today - the company can't use direct-to-consumer brand marketing and relies instead on direct sales efforts targeted at doctors.

Brand marketing helped transform our society (for the better I would argue), contributed to better quality, greater choice and lower relative prices. And along the way, it also provided a load of pleasure - we reminisce as much about the ads of the '60s and '70s as we do about the TV programmes those ads were wrapped around. Promotion was broad, sweeping and general rather than precise and targeted - ads reached out to broad chunks of the population: "C1C2 women in the Granada TV area". The once dominant sales people became mere order takers as the heroes of fmcg became marketers.

Looking in awe and wonder at this brand marketing was the world of British politics. It's not stretching the metaphor to say that, until 1979, British politics was stuck with that pre-war model because the law wouldn't let political parties advertise on TV. Politics worked at the local level where professional agents organised local parties to push the party message - that familiar method of canvassing to identify support and 'get-out-the-vote' to make sure that support materialises. In 1979, two young ad men (and brothers) changed how we campaigned with one poster.

Today this approach - a big, bold brand message poured repeatedly into promotional channels - dominates our political campaigning. That old 'sales-led' approach has atrophied - we still canvass, we still ask people for voting intentions and we still knock up on the day but these activities are marginal to the outcome of a general election. And it is the general election that matters - it is to politics what Christmas is to turkey breeders and Easter is to chocolatiers.

So political parties have turned to the marketing men for inspiration - to get the message honed to perfection, to get that message constant and consistent in every promotional channel. The party machine has been replaced by a team of experts pulled together so as to direct those channels. The leadership doesn't put its effort into policies and ideas that would improve the nation but into enforcing the message.

Politics is beefing up its brand management just as brand marketing begins to falter, as marketers respond to the challenges of a fragmented media market, to aggregation and choice-making systems. We are watching political parties applying the ideas of a past marketing age - relying solely on the power of their brand to achieve success. And it will work (for one or other of the parties) since the heuristic of those big party brands (we often call it 'tribalism' but it's essentially the same as always buying Persil) means that most people will vote for one or the other. Plus, of course, Britain's electoral system makes it hard for new parties - there hasn't been a successful, sustained new party since the Labour Party overtook the Liberals in the 1920s.

The problem (and people from all sides and none in politics have noted this) is that the fastest growing 'brand' in the market isn't a political party but what we might call 'anti-politics'. We watch as brand marketing is used to promote what are essentially hollow shells - things painted to look like large, thoughtful and ideological political organisations but in reality contain little but but ambition.

This isn't to say that there aren't thoughtful, creative and ideological people in politics or to suggest that there isn't a critical and fundamental difference between the politics of 'centre-right' and 'centre-left'. Rather it's to point out that the marketing of politics remains a child of 1950s mass marketing, something done to the public not with the public. And, as Douglas Carswell quite bluntly points out, 'anti-politics' is here to stay:

It's just a phase, many MPs think. Voters are angry over expenses or Iraq or more expenses. But the mood, they presume, will pass.

No, my friends, colleagues and opponents. This anti-politics thingy is not just a phase. It will not abate. We are witnessing a permanent change in the relationship between the governed and the governing.

The big brand politics will carry on for a while - our electoral system guarantees that - but at what moment do we start to worry? When turn out in a general election falls below 50% maybe? In 2010 that already happened in Glasgow NE, Leeds Central and Manchester Central - plus there are another 120 constituencies with turnout below 60%. And none of this accounts for the estimated 20% of the population that don't even bother registering to vote in the first place. Or do we wait until other parties and independents soak up a third or more of the vote in return for a handful of seats? In 2010 in England the two big parties got less than 68% of the vote and all but 57 of the 616 seats.

When I learnt about marketing all those years ago, they told about the 4Ps - promotion, price, place and product. Our political marketers - fresh from running campaigns in Australia or America - seem to have lost sight of these fundamentals and especially any attention to the politcal product. Marketing has become mere promotion leaving behind an etiolated, weak political product. Sound and fury has replaced the idea that politics is a shared enterprise between politicians and the people they represent.

For now nothing will change except that a few more disillusioned folk will turn away from politics. But something will give in the end. With luck what will emerge from that change will be a more conversational politics, one not shaped by the demands of a big brand and its message but by a desire to create the best possible political product.

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More on the crass stupidity of Transition Towns - the case of Totnes

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Some folk from Totnes aren't too happy at the way in which a few well organised green extremists have captured the Town Council and imposed their ridiculous Transition Town Totnes (TTT) idea on the place:

While no one in the Totnes has voted for TTT to dictate town policy, it has enormous influence over town planning policy and the future economic direction of the town. No one in the town voted for TTT to run policy, and it is quite wrong that Totnes Town Council took the unilateral decision to become give us the label of a Transition Town. In fact, if TTT continues to implement its damaging policies it will succeed in turning Totnes centre in a ghost town and make all our lives far more difficult. We want choice, not just TTT's choices.

Indeed the town featured in all the trendy nationals over a campaign against Costa coffee opening and revealed how the green extremists distorted the truth to make their case:

...only 12 per cent of local residents supported its battle against the coffee chain. Its argument that Totnes was a chain free town was a lie. It's claim there are 41 coffee outlets in Totnes included pubs, cafes and restaurants that would have been barely affected even if the arrival of Costa Coffee resulted in fewer coffee sales. Totnes has one dedicated coffee and that, the Curator, open after TTT began its campaign.

These good people have launched a petition - I would urge them to put up for the Town Council and to involve their District and County Councillors (if they've not been taken in by the green extremists). More power to their elbow and success to their petition!

Worse still this green fanatics want to impose a load of huge industrial wind turbines on the place!

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Crying foul at supermarkets won't save the High Street. Getting the offer right just might...

Skipton High Street - success in a small town with three supermarkets

In an article containing a vaguely linked set of slightly left-wing presumptions, John Harris in the Guardian explains how the High Street is “under attack”.

Now, dear reader, set aside images of tripod-like Martian war machines stomping into Cheam and Cheltenham or perhaps sinister masked ninja figures rolling grenades into Marks & Spencer and turning over benches or plant pots in the Arndale. No we’re talking here about those besuited plutocrats that the Guardian so hates (bejeaned, Tuscany-dwelling plutocrats are, of course, fine).

The truth is that big business has failed us, twice. First, while distant high street landlords endlessly put up rents, the boom years saw the accelerated replacement of independent shops with the chains whose names – Game, Peacocks, JJB Sports – denoted the stereotypical clone town. Soon enough, the same firms became bywords for the aftershocks of the crash – and left behind the retail equivalent of scorched earth.

Sadly for Mr Harris, the truth is a great deal more prosaic that this – the High Street is dying because people prefer to shop elsewhere. And where they don’t prefer to shop elsewhere, High Streets – or more to the point, town centres – are not dying.

Perhaps Mr Harris should take a trip to Keighley (I know John, it’s in the North) and walk around this pretty ordinary town counting the empty shops. Sadly for Mr Harris’s thesis he won’t find very many. Indeed, if he walks down Cavendish Street, he’ll see an eclectic mix of shops. For sure, there’s a ‘cash converter’ sort of place and a couple of charity shops. But in amongst there’s an old-fashioned cobbler, an independent toy shop, a gift shop or two, a hairdresser and – wonder of wonders – a hardware store run by a man who actually mends things!

All this in a town with three supermarkets (five if you include Aldi and Iceland, six if you include the wonderful Shaan’s Asian supermarket) – it seems that, if you get the environment right and the offer right, town centres can succeed. And that having supermarkets isn’t the death knell for the High Street either.

Mr Harris spends a deal of time championing negative campaign groups such as Tescopoly rather than asking what might be done to improve and develop – even save – the town centre. We should bear in mind that the fastest growing retail sectors are on-line and factory outlets. Even further from the town centre than the terrible Tesco or the sinister Sainsbury. Places that – despite Mr Harris’s worst fears haven’t killed his “adopted” home of Frome.

Frome has seven – yes folks, seven – supermarkets (Sainsbury, Tesco, ASDA, Somerfield, Iceland, Lidl and Co-op) as well as:

...a town centre that has the rare luxury of scores of independent shops.

The truth in all this is that not only is the negative impact of supermarkets overstated (there is a negative impact but it’s on jobs and secondary grocery outlets, the corner shop, rather than town centre comparison shopping) but this is yesterday’s battle. Today we should be thinking about the role of town centres where comparison shopping has moved on-line.

A while ago I wrote about how our view of town centres has to change:

The driver to the success of Main Street isn’t the shop – although to hear us talk about town centres you would think that – it is the relationship we have with that place and the space it provides for the events and activities of our lives. In Bradford, when Pakistan win at cricket, hundreds of fans head for the local centres. Not to shop but to share their happiness at victory.

Yet we distrust such a use for the spaces of our town centres. Many of us grumble about public drinking, about young people gathering together, about hen parties and stag dos. And we certainly dislike political campaigns and religious promotion (unless of course it’s an official and state-sanctioned occasion) – to the point of complaining about these activities.

To make town centres work we need to start thinking about them differently:

1. places of performance – planned or otherwise
2. centres of culture not temples to shopping
3. a locus for excitement and discovery rather than the workaday
4. as venues for communal celebration, sharing and festivity

In the end, town centres have to be wanted. Not because campaigners have driven away choice but because people want to go there – to shop, to eat, to promenade, to listen, to watch, to sing. The negative attitude of John Harris and his sort won’t change a thing. What will change the town centre is making them places that people – old, young, rich, poor – want to visit. Places of leisure and pleasure - centres of delight, the focus of fun.

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"International evidence proves..." ....that you're probably making it up!

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How often do we here this or one of its variants: "European research shows..." or "Evidence from Australia indicates..." or "Studies in America reveal.."  Often these sweeping statements are made without any referencing - I had this on twitter recently in an exchange with Stella Creasy MP who claimed that evidence from Europe supported her contention that capping lending costs leads to lower (rather than higher) incidence of illegal lending. I did ask Ms Creasy to point me to this evidence but, to date, she has failed to do this preferring instead to prattle about a legal lender sponsoring a prime time ITV game show.

However, I'm not here to have a go at Stella Creasy despite believing that her campaign against Wonga and other down market lenders is well meant but mistaken. What I'm asking is that 'campaigners' stop using evidence from foreign places without letting us doubting folk have the chance to see that evidence.

Dick Puddlecote presents a wonderful example from the Scottish government today:

"International evidence shows minimum pricing will reduce consumption and reduce alcohol-related harm"

As has been the case throughout the minimum pricing debate, the campaigners - and now the government - fail to present evidence to support their contentions about the effects of the policy. This is mostly because there isn't much of this 'international evidence' and it is mostly inconclusive or equivocal on the subject (mind you there at least is some evidence unlike in the case of  plain packs for cigarettes).

The problem, it seems to me, is that those who report on these matters - the newspapers, the broadcasters - fail time and time again to challenge, to say to Stella Creasy; "show us the evidence you speak of, where were the studies conducted, what did they show, have the been replicated". The so-called journalists never say to the spokesman of the Scottish Government; "come on laddie, you can do better than that, let's be having confirmation of that international evidence".

Perhaps (indeed I think this a likelihood) the 'campaigners' know that us doubters, faced with their confident assertion about 'international evidence' or 'studies in Europe', struggle to locate the studies. Look at the evidence from Europe says Stella. We do that, we find studies (they show German illegal lending at three times the levels in the UK - Germany has lending cost controls in the form of interest rate restrictions) and the Stella Creasys of this world say; "not that evidence, studies you know, from Europe."

Why do I think that quite often these 'campaigners' are simply making these sweeping claims knowing that no-one's going to look (other than the industry attacked who can easily be deflected with "they would say that wouldn't they"). And that there's probably some evidence somewhere that, in that equivocal academic way, can be cited in support of the campaign.

Or maybe they're just making stuff up?

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Sorry Ed but you didn't meet the "voters of Bradford West"...

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It was a carefully selected audience designed by Labour Party hacks to give you a platform:

Mr Miliband told the invited audience of 80 Bradford West residents, students, business people and community leaders that he would “personally guarantee” that Labour would take their concerns seriously. 

The problem for Ed Miliband is that, despite this careful selection he still didn't have an easy time - watch the video (and most of that audience were known Labour activists some of them not even residents on Bradford West).

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Charity isn't independent so long as it takes the government's cash...

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It may be the effect of opposition but Labour folk are keen to see the "third sector" distance itself from government. Here's the fresh new MP for Wigan:

"The Labour government treated the third sector like a third arm of the state and I was troubled by that," she said. "I thought it was problematic. Delivering government services means you have to agree with the government about how those services should be run."

As they say, Lisa, 'he who pays the piper calls the tune'!

Despite this the sector seems ever more conflicted over its relationship with government - sure, charities, social enterprises and such want to be 'independent' but they also seem to be firmly attached to the teat of public money. You cannot have it both ways - you can't take the government's money and then campaign against that government's policies.

So if you want an independent voice of advocacy on behalf of your beneficiaries then stop taking the government's cash, stop being sub-contractors to the state and raise your money privately from people who actually support your aims. Simple really!

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Ah memories....

"Tory scum" echoes the (ever so slightly posh) voice behind the presenter.

"Tory scum"

Tears sprang to my eyes at the memory of that cry - so often directed towards me back in the days! I could picture the cry of the trot, newspapers in hand...

"Fight the cuts, fight the Tories. SO-cialist Worker"

There would be the sleek John Rees - resplendent in his expensive bomber jacket and faux-palestinian scarf - crying the cry of the activist. A cry made louder as we tore up his foul rag before his eyes.

Ah, memories of student protest. Of the grand fights against "cuts". Of the struggle, the organising, the mobilising. The memory of the Communist student official who ran a campaign calling for us to vote for him to get:

"More n-n-n-nutty campaigning"

So thank you students for reminding me of those days. I didn't agree with you back then when I was a student and I don't agree with you now.

...but the memories are good!

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Councillor Cooke's draft General Election itinerary

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I’ve been told there’s an election on and have decided – in the interests of research (and getting them elected) – to spend a little time with various Conservative candidates. Not all are standing for parliament, some are local councillors. Most of this will be after 27th April when I am taking time off work for some gentle campaigning.

The people I’ll be supporting (time, money & travel arrangements allowing) – and who you should all support too are:

Glen Miller. Not just because of his name but because he is a very good local councillor in the Worth Valley* (to those with a literary bent that is the area around Haworth and to train buffs has a well-known steam railway). And one of my best friends!

Phil Davies. Partly because he’s my MP (and I’ll expect his support when I’m up for election) but mostly because he’s proved to be one of those voices of sanity on drinking, smoking and personal liberty. He is also this sites official mascot.

Wakey Tory Boy. Otherwise known as Anthony Calvert. Has the task of campaigning to unseat the odious Ed Balls in Morley & Outwood. ‘Nuff said. (Might also nip over to campaign for Nick Pickles whose standing against Ed’s wife in Normanton, Pontefract & Castleford)

Zahid Iqbal. A truly nice guy who will make an independent-minded MP for Bradford West (and the house needs these – especially ones whom understand the property markets).

Val Townend. Councillor for Baildon ward – incredibly hard-working on behalf of her residents, genuinely cares about the communities she represents and is very, very insistant!

Matt Lobley. Another hard-worker (and Chairman of the organisation that employs me) who will do a great job serving people in Leeds North East – including a fair smattering of my wife’s family

Gordon Henderson. Will be the next MP for Sittingbourne & Sheppey – where better that the Kent marches to be an MP! Won’t be a pussy cat when he gets there – like my MP, Gordon’s a fervent eurosceptic and has a penchant for outspoken bluntness. Also a man with a successful business career and impeccable local roots

Iain Lindley. Rather owe Iain support for his running of the Vote UK forum – although god knows what will happen if he gets elected. All us political anoraks with no forum! A tough fight in Worsley & Eccles South but Iain’s got as good a chance as anyone.

I'm happy to consider supporting others - if you're a Tory and can put up a good case for having me turn up to help, just let me know!

Whatever, I'll be blogging a few thoughts on these campaigns.

*political geek point: Worth Valley Ward was once represented by Eric Pickles and contains the birthplaces of the late Bob Cryer and spinmeister, Alistair Campbell.
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