Politicians are terrified - that's why they're so keen on regulating the web

Politicians are terrified. Really they are and it explain a great deal about today's politics. And also why those politicians are so keen to regulate content online:

We’ve all been watching this develop for years now: the internet is being slow-choked, not by rapacious ISPs forcing users to pay for “fast lanes,” but by politicians on both sides of the Atlantic who want to have a bigger role in what we’re allowed to do and say online.

"You're really publishers," say those politicians to platforms filled with user generated content. This is, until heavy hints changed things, a complete fiction. A publisher controls - from start to finish - the content of the publication, nothing arrives in front of the reader's eyes or the listener's ears without having been subject to editorial control. So when I post a Tweet, I'm the publisher not Twitter.

And this is why politicians are so scared. They thought they knew where they were with the media - it was limited, they knew the editors and journalists, saw them most days, took them out for dinner, even shagged them. Now it's not like that- there are literally millions of micro-publishers all with the potential power to take one of those politicians down. The game has changed, power has shifted and the politicians want it shifting back.

As some folk point out, some of the big tech oligarchs - Mark Zuckerberg, Tim Cook - are keen to work with politicians in a ghastly Faustian pact to allow regulatory control but not enough to really damage the tech businesses, just enough to make it really hard for new competitors to challenge the market position of Facebook and Apple. But then, especially in the USA (Europe essentially has no tech industry worth mentioning unless you like legacy corporate IT architecture), these tech moguls are political players - their money, their platforms, their influence will be a big part in who challenges Trump.

Plenty of justifications are rolled out for regulation - trolls, children, fake news, anonymity, racism, misogyny and homophobia. But these things, for all their shock factor, are convenient handholds for the politicians to latch onto in justifying regulation intended to sustain the current political structures, to protect existing politicians, and to make it harder for challenger ideas to get purchase and exercise influence.

I don't think the bureaucrats, legacy media, and establishment politicians will win this - at least in the long run, but the push for regulation will damage the economy, will restrict free speech and will make it harder to do what the web has done best, speak truth to power. You all should resist.

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More on why Remain lost (clue - it wasn't the media)

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It had seemed that we were getting to grips with the reasons behind the Brexit vote. Once we'd got over the cries of pain and anguish from disappointed Remain supporters, a narrative began to emerge. This narrative took us beyond the simplistic line of 'it was immigration that won it for Leave' to some more sophisticated assessments of voting patterns and behaviours. Added to this were appraisals - from outside and inside the two campaigns - of the marketing strategies and tactics used to promote Leave or Remain.

Broadly the reasons underlying the Leave vote began to crystalise - a lack of trust in authority, a conviction that Leave offered control and using a referendum vote to kick out at a system that served too many people poorly. Plus, of course (and this is still the most significant factor in Brexit), people wanted the UK to leave the European Union.

Alongside these reasons sits the failures of the Remain campaign - from tactical incompetence through to a strategy founded on the assumption that voters would trust 'experts', from whatever field, who advised to vote Remain. All this plus a torrent of scare stories that didn't work because the target voters simply didn't trust the messengers.

It seems, however, that we're not quite out of the woods and the discredited narrative of dumb leave voters not listening to 'experts' remains. We need to stress again that this narrative - like the narrative of old vs young - doesn't fit the facts regardless of how much people want it to. All it does it fit perceptions of those leave voters and act as wish-fulfilment for some (fortunately a declining few) looking back at the referendum.

Here is a particularly bad example of this wish-fulfilment from economist, John Van Reenan:

There are many other notable features of the Brexit vote – including the fact that Remain had a voting majority for those under 50 years of age and also in London, Scotland and Northern Ireland. It is shocking that a constitutional rupture can be made based on 37 per cent of the eligible voters. We take decades debating and prevaricating on major infrastructure projects like Heathrow and Hinkley Point, yet are prepared to gamble with something even more important for our futures on a simple one-off in-out referendum.

The referendum was won on a drumbeat of anti-foreigner sentiment. It’s the same tune being played by demagogues in every corner of the globe. It’s the same tune that was played in the 1930s. It’s the same old beat that rises in volume when people are afraid. In the UK, it’s echoed by a rabidly right-wing press and unchallenged by a flaccid establishment media. Mixed by a band of unscrupulous liars and political zealots, it has become a tsunami of bile that has downed and drowned a once great nation. The only question is which other countries will now be swept along in this poisonous flood.

This screech of pain - rejecting democratic choice, conflating constitution with infrastructure investment and invoking Godwin's Law - builds on the only substantive point in Van Reenan's article, the role of the media. Like so many, Van Reenan falls for the simple belief that, in some way, it was the media that won it for Leave.

The problem is that there's little solid evidence to support the 'it was The Sun wot won it' line - that the media (keen to maintain perceptions of power) is central to the outcomes of political campaigning. Too few understand how the media influences our behaviour just as too few are able to appreciate how advertising doesn't increase aggregate demand. And we have seen a shift in media consumption with newspaper readership declining sharply and people relying on broadcast and online sources. Yet the sinister influence of newspapers is still stressed:

Most of the British press has been unrelentingly Eurosceptic and anti-immigrant for decades. This built to a crescendo during the Brexit campaign with the most popular dailies like the Sun, Mail and Express little more than the propaganda arm of the Leave campaign.

Now this is simply a statement - Van Reenan doesn't present any evidence to support his contention and I'm guessing wasn't a regular reader of the three publications he accuses of bias (worth noting here that the Mail on Sunday supported Remain which doesn't fit his narrative well). Instead, Van Reenan attacks the BBC for doing its job - set out very clearly in the law - of providing balanced reportage during election campaigns. Even worse, we're told that the BBC - and I guess other broadcasters governed by balance and impartiality regulations - should abandon this because of an opinion poll, not a very good one, of economists.

Amidst all this, we should recall that during the referendum campaign, Leave advocates criticised the BBC (and other broadcasters like Sky News) for favouring arguments to Remain. You really can't win this one and the broadcasters will be quite happy to get flak from both sides in the referendum.

This isn't to say that media is unimportant - the public consistently tell pollsters that they trust broadcast media so what they say (or don't say) matters. But structured communications are only a part of any political campaign, the other part of campaigns - sometimes called, with that love of military metaphor so common to politics, the ground war - is just as important to the outcome. And it works like this:

So it was that Bird and his colleagues drew up plans to ­expand the electorate into one that could reelect Obama. In Ohio, for example, a “barber shop and beauty salon” strategy was designed to get likely Obama supporters, particularly African-Americans, to register to vote when they went for a haircut. “Faith captains” were assigned to churches to encourage parishioners to turn out for Obama. “Condo captains” were told to know every potential Obama voter in their building. The goal was like nothing seen in presidential politics: Each Obama worker would be ­responsible for about 50 voters in key precincts over the course of the campaign. By Election Day, that worker would know much about the lives of those 50 voters, including whether they had made it to the polls. Romney’s team talked about a ratio of thousands of voters per worker. It would prove to be a crucial difference.

It was here that Remain performed badly. The reason why working-class voters tumbled out from council estates to vote Leave was more about word of mouth than mass media - conversations in hairdressers, in the pub, at work, at the garden gate, with family. Voting Leave was valorised - reinforced and confirmed by people's daily conversation. The failure of the Remain campaign was to rely on mainstream media to feed this conversation whereas Leave fed enough information to activists to provide a drip-drip of arguments, refutations, reinforcements and messages into those community conversations.

It is dispiriting that people in influential positions misunderstand communications so much - Remain felt position and authority were enough to get the campaign over the line and ignored the importance of trust and brand equity. And - if Van Reenan's article is anything to go by - some Remain supporters are still looking for others to blame rather than the abject failings of their own campaign. Saying it was the media simply doesn't wash.

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Corbyn's Labour really does hate the idea of a free press and free speech

Asked whether a Labour government would break up media monopolies, he said: "Yes. We are developing a media policy which would be about breaking up the single ownership of too many sources of information, so that we have a multiplicity of sources. And actually promoting co-operative ownership and access, including local TV and radio stations and newspapers like The Morning Star."

There are many things he says that I find chilling but this statement from Jermey Corbyn is a terrifying attack on the free press and free speech. I know you're all going to talk about how Rupert Murdoch is incredibly evil because he owns lots of media and doesn't vote Labour. I know so many want to pretend - against all the evidence to the contrary - that Murdoch's businesses have some sort of monopoly over the media and the the man himself is Henry H. Potter spinning his scrurvy webs like some sort of sinister spider.

You are wrong. If there is a media monopoly in the UK (and I don't think this is remotely the case) then it is the BBC not News International. This isn't an attack on Aunty but simply an observable truth - in terms of what people out there are watching, the BBC remains the dominant media organisation and this applies especially to news.

What Jeremy Corbyn, in his pretty typical hard left way, is saying is that the private ownership of media with the aim of turning a profit results in distorted news. The argument will run on to suggest that monopolies in media are therefore a problem and need to be broken up. Yet the UK does not have a media environment that features any sort of monopoly (unless you look at the BBC, of course). If you focus just on national newspapers this still isn't true even though Rupert Murdoch 'controls' a goodly chunk of them. And more to the point those newspapers no longer represent people's preferred source of news - we've the TV, the radio, our lap-tops and increasingly assorted apps on our smartphones. Twitter and Facebook are probably more important as news sources than The Times or The Guardian these days.

No, the real reason Jeremy Corbyn wants to control the press is because - as he noted just before that comment above in the Morning Star - it is critical of what his 'caring, sharing new politics' is about. So just like his pals on Bradford council wanting to ban folk they disagree with, Corbyn wants to cripple a diverse media environment through threats of 'break-up', seizure and control. We are reminded again that Labour really does hate the idea of a free press.

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A Yorkshire tale or "We get the media we deserve. And it ain't pretty."

This morning I went to listen to the Prime Minister. And he had a lot to say - about prison reform, promoting digital government, the case for deficit reduction, payment by results and getting decision-making closer to ordinary people through devolution. It was interesting and important - it doesn't matter whether you agree with the Conservative agenda or not, what he said mattered.

As I left the venue for the PM's speech a BBC TV reporter poled up to me accompanied by a cameraman. The camera was pointed in my face and a microphone shoved at me.

"Did you listen to the Prime Minister's speech this morning," asks the reporter.

"Yes" I reply.

"Would you like to comment on something Mr Cameron said before the speech that we picked up and recorded. Something about Yorkshire people hating each other?"

"No" I reply.

This conversation was repeated (only more brusquely) with another BBC reporter - this time a local one.

Now I could at this point have a good old go at the priorities of the media - how a mild gaffe by the Prime Minister is more important to them, a sort of "ha ha ha, he he he, gotcha, you're an idiot" approach to the news. But the reality is that the media are just a mirror to society - this petty and irrelevent news-making reflects our sad pleasure in schadenfreude and childish slapstick. Instead of reporting the actual news, we prefer to either point and giggle or else (and worse) adopt a faux-outrage for the sake of political point-scoring and the indulgence of our prejudices.

The problem here is that people who disagree politically with Cameron will dollop their prejudice all over social media, will ring up phone ins and generally behave as if the Prime minister had suggested the rounding up and summary execution of every Yorkshireman (perhaps followed by raising towns to the ground and ploughing the earth with salt). It's not simply that these people have conveniently mislaid their vestigial sense of humour but that they see Cameron's comment as the most important element of the news.

It's fine for such an approach to feature in gossip-mongers like Private Eye or Guido Fawkes but the BBC is not there to peddle eavesdropped gossip but to report the things that matter. Ramming a microphone in my face is fine if you're going to ask me about the speech I've just heard but not if you just want to find someone to express the faux outrage that will make your pathetic piece of tittle-tattle into a better story.

In the end this sort of focus - taken up with self-important comments like "this shows the utter contempt that Cameron and the Tories have for the North and exposes the whole devolution agenda as a con" - shows the complete lack of any depth or substance in much of our political debate. And the fault lies with us, with our preference for ad hominem, our obsession with trying to catch people out, and our tendency to conduct political debate in the manner of two ten-year-old boys - 'my Dad's bigger than your Dad', 'we've got a bigger car and two tellies', 'you're stupid with a snotty nose', 'bogey boy, bogey boy, na na na'.

I'm not being partisan here - it's just as bad when the focus is on Ed Miliband eating a sandwich or Andy Burnham talking to a fake donor (isn't is odd how the media think it fine to use deception but are so judgemental about deception in others). Not only are we a staggeringly hypocritical society but we a in danger of becoming down right nasty - only a degree away from picking on someone because they've a runny nose or spectacles or ginger hair or a funny walk. For sure we can all have a laugh at what Cameron said and, if you like that sort of thing, at his discomfort. But it really has nothing to do with the Government's programme or with what are today's important news stories.

We get the media we deserve. Petty, insubstantial, snide, gossipy and, at times, just nasty. The media do this because it seems to be what we want. Laughing at others misfortune, ogling celebrities' divorces, manufacturing offence, and conducting debate on the basis of gotcha rather than a considered assessment of the issues and challenges facing political decision-makers. Not very pretty.

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Instead of choreographed leaders debates, let's just broadcast lots of local hustings...

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More froth and bother has been expended over the matter of TV debates than on any number of things that actually matter in our lives. Partly this is because the big broadcasters dominate the agenda with newspapers and the hordes of spinners, PR men and political hangers on toddling along behind. The 'Westminster Bubble' some call this - a place where debate is conducted on the basis of triangulating political careers and pulling the wool over the electorate's eyes rather than with the intention of seeking solutions.

The voters are sitting there - in as much as they're paying any attention at all - looking bemusedly on as shouts of 'chicken' are interspersed with ever more complicated explanations as to whether this or that format for a TV debate is most appropriate and even more occult explanations about the reasons a particular date or location is wrong.

I think we need to move on from this sterile sideshow to real political decisions. A grand televised showpiece was always a bad idea (it was in 1966 when Harold Wilson refused a debate with Ted Heath and remained so in 2010 when Gordon, Dave and Nick graced our screens). Not only does it undermine the premise of our democracy - the election of representatives - but it trivialises debate. The format is set up to focus on presentation and style rather than content or the sharing of argument. Most people won't watch but rather will see a few carefully chosen soundbites on the evening news while listening to the so-called 'political reporter' analysing the leaders' hair, ties and body language. This is not debate but yet another example of politics as show-business, the triumph of gloss over substance.

In these days of the Internet, of easy live broadcasting and of social media interaction, we need to rethink what we want from debates. Do we want, over the period of the campaign, two or three grandstand events carefully orchestrated to shine nothing on the real issues of the campaign? Or do we want to sent the broadcasters - the big guys and the little guys, radio and TV - out into the UK's 350 constituencies where real debates might be taking place? Every constituency has a few local hustings - usually organised by a local church group or a voluntary organisation - that bring the candidates together to debate subjects raised by the local audience. Why don't we broadcast lots of these rather than a sterile and preening debates between a load of leaders who aren't on the ballot paper for most of us?

Instead of a debate moderated through carefully planned national events, we'd see a more untidy campaign where sometimes the 'wrong' thing gets said and sometimes candidates stray from the approved line. It would be invigorating and would perhaps involve more people in debating the issues rather than treating the election as a sort of beauty contest between leaders or manifesto slogans moderated by the broadcast media.

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On the power of the media...

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We are reminded by Alex Massie:

Speaking of which, we might, when considering over-mighty media moguls remember that Murdoch is not the main player in the British media landscape. That honour belongs to the BBC. Nearly six times as many Britons watch BBC1 than read The Sun. The BBC’s website has more readers than any Murdoch title. And across all platforms, online, on television and on radio, the BBC does more to shape and mould public attitudes than any other media enterprise. This is so even if it also often takes its lead from the newspapers.

This is a central - and important - point in an excellent article on the lynch mob chasing Rupert Murdoch.

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The politics of trivia and the triumph of gossip

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The little frisson of silliness that was a stray tweet from a Newsnight editor about Rachel Reeves reminds us that the trivial is more important than the substantive in politics. As Marbury reminds us:

It's a tiny, trivial thing, a bit of fluff. It should have been brushed off with a joke: a little self-deprecation, or a punchy retort. It should have been forgotten about within 24 hours. But no. Syria burns, the British economy makes its joyless progress, the Royal Mail is privatised. Meanwhile, here is one of the most senior members of the Labour Party's front bench whining on about her hurt feelings on the front page of a national newspaper, four days after this non-event, ensuring that this nothingy story - this story about her, and her magnificently sensitive ego - runs across the weekend. Yes, here is a serious person. Here is a person ready for government.

I didn't see the offending programme. Indeed probably 99% of the British public didn't see the offending programme (and many of those who did will have been half asleep anyway). So why the sensitivity? Or is this a case of using faux offence to get onto the front page of the Guardian, to milk the sensibilities of that sympathetic audience?

All this - much as is the case with opinion polls of councillors asking whether they like their party leader - is simply the dumbing down of politics, continuing its transition from a serious business to something akin to a second rate soap opera. Rather than discussions of the things that matter - war, wealth and health - we get endless dissection of the minutiae of politics, which politician is up, which one down, who said what to whom and what effect something someone said will have on elections, polls or the opinion of party members.

We are treat to 'star' interviewers who are more important than their guests. And who resort of interruption, endless 'when did you stop beating your wife' questions and snide asides rather than doing the real job of the interviewer. This is followed by the intonations of some bloke stood outside Number 10 and who is treated like some shaman or soothsayer - an expert rather than just another journalist. A man who doesn't talk about the issues but in a bizarre post-modern way, of the effect some decision, event or argument might have on how the prime minister (or some other leader) is perceived at some unspecified future election or poll.

We are in the age of the trivial and politicians have figured this out. Hence Rachel reeves being 'oh so upset' about a mildly critical comment from a BBC producer. This is a story in the way that the Labour Party's policies on banking, finance or pig farming simply aren't.

Gossip has triumphed!

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Is anyone paying attention....

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Over the years I've remarked often that most people, most of the time, simply aren't remotely interested in politics. More to the point those people not only aren't interested, they aren't paying attention. Yes we can grab their attention by putting a big headline in front of their eyes - to which they'll respond with an "oh yes, terrible" sort of remark and then return to chatting about the football or the latest celebrity divorce. Or more likely, what their children are doing at school and the latest gossip about colleagues at work.

It may pain us political types but all that effort to 'dominate the media narrative' or other such tommy-rot of the spinners world is just that, tommy-rot. People aren't paying attention. Here's Populus' weekly poll that asks people what stories they've noticed:

Only the NHS story among these is relevant to UK politics and just 8% 'noticed'. People really aren't paying attention to the news (even where they're watching the news programmes, I suspect this flitters through people's lives like background noise).

Now some of the politically-obsessed will now be heard muttering about 'apathy' and 'engagement', even 'participation'. These anoraks miss the point - the point is that wealth and comfort makes politics less and less relevant to people. And this is a good thing, it represents a little more withering away of government - another step towards us not actually needing government at all.

Now I appreciate that, right now, we have the most intrusive government since we decided that the king wasn't a god and didn't own all the stuff as of right. But this covers over the fact that most people's connection with government comes through one or all of health, education, welfare or having the bin emptied. And so long as they're not actively annoyed or upset by one of these, they have few problems with government.

The shift here is from government being something that is actively done to us to us being consumers of government. It really doesn't matter whether we pay directly or through taxes, we perceive ourselves as customers rather than subjects. And the debate around politics is about us exercising our consumption role rather than choosing someone to "run the country". Elections are the point at which we can choose different strategies for managing those services - it may not be the best way to do this but it's the way, for now, we've chosen. So when the Conservatives were rambling on about financial sovereignty and other such grand matters, Tony Blair talked about 'schools and hospitals' and won the election.

For me the importance of this change from subject to customer is that it suggests that government is not necessary - at least not on its current scale - to the delivery of what we currently (and wrongly) see as 'public goods'. There is a reducing need for us to provide, for example, healthcare or education through the medium of government, it is a choice that we make because it seems to us better, fairer or more effective.

The big winners in this sort of politics are those who - as Blair did - focus on what, when I was a student activist, called "soft loo-paper politics". Rather than endeavouring to change the world (or even Hull University) the successful political leader focuses on getting better services - health, education, filling in potholes. And the politician - the MP or councillor - bends his efforts to dealing with these issues, to be someone who badgers away at the minutiae of constituency problems. The old sort of MP - a grand fella who lives grandly in London and descends on the constituency for the AGM, the annual dinner and a couple of (reluctant) weeks at election time - no longer fits the bill however valuable the contribution of those men might have been.

A good few years ago I wrote in praise of 'idiots'  - those people who didn't engage, weren't involved and only (at best) reluctantly turned out to cast a vote in elections:

Round here they’re probably in their thirties or forties, employed at a middle management level in business and industry. They worry about how well their kids do at school, they concern themselves with making their family safe, they grumble a bit about paying taxes but have enough cash afterwards for it not to really matter. Such folk are ordinary, hard-working and inherently conservative. But they also see little or no link between the act of voting in a politician from one party or another and the significant things in their lives.

Or to put it another way, these people aren't paying attention. And isn't that wonderful, cheering and independent!

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So what shall we ban today then? (A guide for the ambitious nannying fussbucket)

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There is almost nothing - nothing I say - that we couldn't find grounds for controlling, directing and, if you don't behave properly, banning. However, in order to direct your plans for bans here are some helpful hints.

1. Authorities are more open to bans, restrictions or regulations when the thing in question is pleasurable. Indeed, the ban that today's authorities most wish to introduce is a ban on hedonism, on enjoying something just because it's enjoyable

2. If you've found your target for a ban - let's say it's Kendal Mint Cake - you need to find some sort of vague, probably spurious connection to a problem in society (health and crime are the best bets). You don't need evidence just the bold assertion of your case - 'Mint Cake is sold as a healthy product for the outdoors but is really just pure sugar which causes obesity, rotten teeth and hyperactive children'

3. It's better still if you can claim that the product is addictive and still more wonderful if you've an example of the evil effect - "Twenty-four stone teenager Kylie Spottiswood is hooked on the sugar hit of Mint Cake and eats twelve bars a day." You can add to the misery level with quotes from people about how Kylie was an outgoing, vivacious girl until she ate her first Mint Cake - just one and she was hooked on the sugar and mint combination (even better with the chocolate coating)

4. Some expert endorsement is helpful too - there are thousands of quacks and charlatans out there (not to mention some serious ban-fans who actually have medical degrees) so you'll find one to suit, I'm sure. And the newspapers - even the Daily Mail, famed for the rigour of its investigative journalism - seldom check the credentials of experts. A couple of vanity articles in an "open access" journal published from above a laundry in Calcutta doesn't look any different to the average journalist from being published in the New England Journal of Medicine

5. Set up a foundation, petition or even just a website - look official! "The Cumbrian Sugar Sweet Trust - campaigning to protect our children" or some such line (all shiny and pretty on a nice modern Wordpress site) will work wonders. And sign up a few worthies - a couple of local councillors, a retired doctor, a dentist. But remember it's the enraged parents - the mums and dads - who didn't know about the dangers of Mint Cake that are your real target.

6. Tell a story - it doesn't matter how fast and loose you are with actual facts - about the pain and anguish that this evil sugar confectionery has brought on you and you family. And send this story to everyone - MPs, vicars, bishops, government officials, journalists, Nicky Campbell, the Queen, some more journalists, George Monbiot, assorted charities, more journalists. Someone will pick it up and run with it.

And then you've achieved your aim. Not the ban but a temporary and spurious fame (and a chance for an earner or two). Now, whenever the scandal of sugar confections crops up your phone will ring - media appearance (kerching!), you'll get to write heartfelt pieces in national newspapers (kerching!) and maybe, just maybe, there'll be the magazine feature about Kylie and her efforts to return to a normal life (kerching, kerching!!).

Either that or Kendal Mint Cake will sue the pants off you!

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What you say is more important than where you say it...

In this age of instant broadcast, of social media, blogs and Skype we've become obsessed with the place where we say things. "Are you on Facebook?", "Do you use Twitter?", "Oh you must get a blog - everyone has a blog these days."

We're urged to engage, to participate, to "get on-line". Barely a minute passes at some gathering without someone posting a snap, or pinging out some cute witticism. Torrents of quotes - all with the appropriate hashtag - are poured into Twitter for our delectation. And we rush back from wherever we've been to pen our bon mots about the experience for our readers.

It is as if we live in some place where Marshall McLuhan's words have been given speed:

The medium is the message. This is merely to say that the personal and social consequences of any medium - that is, of any extension of ourselves - result from the new scale that is introduced into our affairs by each extension of ourselves, or by any new technology.

We zoom about communicating wildly and enthusiastically - firing out semi-shaped ideas into the ether to be snaffled by a few who send them further out into the web's wilds.  We make banal - almost specious - comparisons: "Twitter is like a pub" for example. If that's so it's the weirdest pub I've ever seen - but this familiarises the medium, making it sort of homely. So we pour ourselves another glass and carry on firing out dribble into the world.

And we think this is important. Not the individual tweet or status update. Not the singular blog posting or the particular Fickr stream. No, the idea of 'social media', the concept that this little machine in our pockets makes us more engaged, reinvents our personal social capital on a bigger canvas.

But when you look at it - poke around at what we post, we see very little that is profound and almost nothing that is change making. Bloggers like Guido Fawkes crow about how they are faster to the story than the papers, how they fill the hole vacated by Private Eye. And what is that gap - it serves only our love or gossip, of tittle-tattle. For each exposure of 'wrong-doing', we get a flood of who's in and who's out, petty little bitch-fights and endless self-aggrandisement.

We love it too. We've always loved gossip - it's why we invented the newspaper, it's what journalism is really about and it's what keeps the wheels of social interaction turning. If there's no-one to talk about, no drownings or shipwrecks, no scandal, nothing to laugh at - then there's no conversation. But this gossip does not change anything any more than screaming mobs change anything - other than their poor victim's lives.

Words change things - they inspire change when they say something to our soul. Ask yourselves when you last read - or heard - something that changed what you did, that altered how you see the world, that made you do something differently? I don't mean switching coffee brand or how you wear your hair, I mean really changed how you thought about something?

So - if what we say is more important than where we say it - why do we bother more about the means of communicating than about the content of our communications? Why do we eschew poetry in preference for doggerel and prefer the rant to fine prose? As a councillor I can communicate with residents by email, by tweet, through facebook and via a blog. I can fire up Skype, create forums and even send a letter. But is this enough - should I give more attention to what I'm saying than to the media I use to say it? Do residents not deserve better than; "reported potholes in South Street, council acting on it" or a blog post explaining how many meetings I've attended and how easy it is for residents to reach me? Is it really either needed or helpful for residents to know how I'm charging about "on their behalf" all the time?


All this frantic activism rather destroys the idea that we're about more than making sure the Town Hall loo has soft paper. That we might want to consider bigger issues, to philosophise, to ask questions and to seek answers. Maybe we can do this best with our mates and a beer in our hand. Or out for a long walk with family (or even the dog). But we need to do more of it, to challenge our own beliefs, to ponder on the ideas of others and to consider what we think is the right thing to do.


Our obsession with the medium - the way we communicate - represents a sort of 'triumph of the geek', a rejection of the idea that what we say matters. It is enough to say a lot, regardless of its banality.

To see a world in a grain of sand
And a heaven in a wild flower
Hold infinity in the palm of you hand
And eternity in an hour

What we say really is more important than where we say it.

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#Greenpeacefail...

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If, say, a lobby group for forestry interests did this there would be the most enormous outcry:

The event was a hoax, and so was the follow-up email and the website with its often hilarious-if-it-wasn't-true fake...marketing copy.

Yet environmental campaign group Greenpeace are revelling in their media manipulation, lies and misrepresentation. Indeed as the New Statesman (hardly the most anti-green bunch) have put it:

The real villain here is Greenpeace. This is an NGO that thinks it is acceptable to lie to the public, to lie to bloggers and journalists, and to then intimidate writers with threatening emails warning of legal action. This absolutely is not okay. I don’t care if you’re saving the Arctic, rescuing kittens from YouTube’s vicious pet-celebrity training camps, or training pandas to pull famine-ridden children out of earthquake debris; to behave in this deceitful way demonstrates an astonishing amount of contempt for the public - not least for environmentalist supporters who spread their message in good faith only to find themselves forced into embarrassing retractions.

There is a limit to the bounds of campaigning. For me, Greenpeace crossed it years ago when they forced Shell to adopt a less environmentally sensible disposal of a redundant oil rig for the sake of cheap headlines and the 'kerching' of the organisations cash register. But this really is stepping even further beyond those bounds:

“Even if you think Shell is evil and will lie to achieve their goals, now you know Greenpeace is the exact same way.” 

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The slow death of political parties - perhaps they should try some marketing?

The BBC finally cottoned on to something that some of us have known for ages – political parties are dying out:

Political party membership appears to be in terminal decline in the UK - so can anything be done to reverse the trend? And does it matter?

It was once a source of cultural identity and pride for millions of British people.

But at just over 1% of the population - low by European standards - party membership is fast becoming a minority pursuit.

There are more members of the Caravan Club, or the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, than of all Britain's political parties put together.

The BBC reporter goes on to speculate as to the reasons for this calamitous situation – politics is boring, the rise in ‘individualism’ (pointing oddly at twitter and facebook as evidence of this trend) and the decline of political clubs. What the reporter doesn’t ask – choosing instead to report on the latest round of frantic efforts to get more folk involved from Labour and Conservative Parties - is why?

The problem is pretty simple – only anoraks and the politically ambitious join political parties because these are the only people who get something from membership. When I pay my subscription to the Royal Horticultural Society, I don’t do so in order to attend meetings but in order to get privileged entry to the Society’s gardens and events. This isn’t noble any more that joining the National Trust or RSPB is sold to us as a selfless act.

The problem with political parties is that there is no offer. In times past there was an offer – essentially a well-connected social life. People joined the Conservative Party because it provided a round of dances, parties and sherry mornings. The Young Conservatives (a much better name than the current ultra-naff “Conservative Future”) thrived – becoming Europe’s biggest youth organisation – on this basis.

At a family event a while back – sadly a funeral – I was taken by the extent to which all those attending has made friends, met wives or husbands and developed business contacts through the YCs. The vicar who led the eulogies spoke of being a YC, of borrowing the Mission to Seamen’s van for boozy nights out and of the lasting connections made in those few years. All – or nearly all – this has now gone.

And I’m sure the same goes for the Labour Party.

Despite not having an offer – a reason for someone to pay a chunk of cash to join – the political parties continue to dream that the volunteer-driven, inconsistent and fractious structures of meetings, committees and contradictory bureaucracy will serve to create what Ed Miliband calls (I so love this):

...a modern, outward-looking organisation

While at the same time Ed – seeing the payments to councillors – takes an easy route to raising cash. Introducing a tithe:

A leaked report shows that the Opposition leader plans to force more than 5,000 Labour councillors to hand over seven per cent of their town hall ‘wages’ to stop party coffers running dry.

And Labour’s frontbench team has called for increases in wages paid to councillors, which would benefit the party by resulting in an increase in the value of the new levy.

But before all the Tories out there get excited, we do this too. I pay a proportion of my basic councillor’s allowance to my local association. This is a requirement demanded of me for being permitted to stand as a Conservative and amounts to around £1,000 per year. In addition, I’m expected to pay my own election expenses if I am successful.

And this is the problem. Not that I have to pay but that the leadership of our political parties see public funding as the salvation to the financial woes of those parties and to escaping from the curse of the billionaire – the appearance that very rich men can, and did, effectively buy political parties.

The first front in the desire of political parties to become institutions of the state was the introduction of “Short Money” in the mid 1970s. This seemed a jolly idea – let’s help the opposition work better by giving it, as a political institution, some public money for that purpose. And it is not an insignificant sum of money – in 2009/10 in amounted to nearly £7m. But it acted to show the parties that they could turn to the state to solve their financial woes rather than rasie money the hard way.

And many – building on the creation of a protected legal status for political parties – now argue for direct state funding for political parties. Most notably Sir Hayden Phillips in his 2007 report that followed the “cash for honours” scandal:

In a complex formula to give state aid to parties, which would give a major boost to smaller parties from the Greens to the BNP, the report suggests that funding should be linked to general election votes in order to establish that fringe or new parties have a "base of support in the community". 

It recommends that eligible parties should receive 50p each year for every vote cast for them in the most recent general election and 25p for every vote in the most recent ballots for the Scottish parliament, Welsh assembly and European parliament. 

In addition, Sir Hayden suggests an internet-based system for parties to attract subscribing "supporters", who would pay £5 which would be matched by the same amount from public funds - up to a cap of £5m. 

In return for such public funding - which would replace the small policy grants currently available to parties - political parties would have to produce an annual report showing how the money had been spent. 

Such a system – however much the ‘great and good’ may like it – would represent the death of politics and create parties as clients of state bureaucrats rather than as private, campaigning organisations. Yet that seems the only solution – there isn’t a look across to successful membership organisations asking how they achieve that success.

And it is pretty simple really:

1.  A strong, consistent brand and public offer focused on consumer benefits as well as the wider mission of the organisation.
2. A well-resourced, professional and dedicated marketing operation – not one using the gimmicks of PR but one founded in fundraising, direct marketing and sales
3. Regular and high quality communication with the member, prospective member and supporter – containing offers, incentives and rewards as well as information about the mission and achievements of the organisation

This is why the RSPB, National Trust, Caravan Club and even Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth have succeeded while the political parties decline. It isn’t simply “social change” or other such mumbo-jumbo of an excuse but that political parties in the UK focus on servicing the needs of political elites rather than on developing a public offer giving reason for the ordinary person to join the party.

Nothing will change – the parties will carry on declining, continue to disengage with the public and eventually will take more of the state’s money. At no point will these parties turn to us marketers and ask: “how can we build a membership as big as the RSPBs?”

And that’s a question we can answer.

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Twitter and recruitment - an interesting observation

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From HR.com's Geoff Newman:

Many companies - particularly those involved in the media - are putting a premium on candidates with strong social media footprints when it comes to the recruitment of new staff.

The case has been highlighted by the recent poaching of the BBC's popular chief political correspondent - and avid Twitterer - Laura Kuenssberg by ITV. Kuenssberg has a 60,000-strong army of loyal Twitter followers, and executives at ITV said that it had been a noted "additional benefit" when they were looking at recruiting her.  

Bosses at the commercial broadcaster said that her strong harnessing of Twitter as a means of engaging with her viewers was an excellent example of how they were trying to get their correspondents to engage with social media.

Very interesting.

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It really is time for us Councillors to stop being so self-important about the reporting of our meetings

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Just a reminder to all the Conservatives who seem to think photographs, filming, twitter and other modern media things should be expunged from Council meetings. Here is what Eric Pickles had to say on the matter:

"Fifty years ago, Margaret Thatcher changed the law to make councils open their meetings to the press and public. This principle of openness needs to be updated for the 21st Century. More and more local news comes from bloggers or citizen journalists telling us what is happening at their local council. 

"Many councils are internet-savvy and stream meetings online, but some don't seem to have caught up with the times and are refusing to let bloggers or hyper-local news sites in."

He added: "Opening the door to new media costs nothing and will help improve public scrutiny." 

We really can't have situations where people get arrested for filming a council meeting, where twitter is banned from meetings and where - as happened in Bradford - a press photographer is thrown out.

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Super-injunctions and the media missing the point

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After perhaps six or so weeks of discussion in various corners of the 'blogosphere' - notably regarding the efforts of John Hemming MP to raise his concerns in Parliament - the big media boys and girls have finally noticed. Or rather have fixed on one aspect of the problem - its use to protect the 'privacy' of footballers, actors and politicians who don't wish for their sexual adventures, peccadilloes and misbehaviour to be paraded across newspapers and TV screen for the public's titillation and entertainment. As the Daily Mirror puts it:

The people who are granted injunctions that prevent the media revealing things of which they are ashamed have two things in common.

They are all rich and they are all men.

These injunctions aren’t just creating a privacy law, which should be the prerogative of Parliament, but can be an attack on women who ­understandably want to reveal how they have been treated.

All very righteous but, I feel, missing the main point. The place where John Hemming started wasn't with some footballer's sex life but with the family courts. With the gagging of people through threats to remove children, with the seeming tendency of the courts to protect the professional rather than the child and with the byzantine - even Kafka-esque - processes within these systems.

The person in question could actually be jailed for telling his MP that he had been in court case No. 773. What is so sensitive about that? In practice, even family court proceedings are not that confidential. I think this case was in the Commercial and Admiralty court. My first question is not just how the hell this could happen – I apologise for the non-parliamentary language, Mr Bone. How does this happen? How many more of these cases are there? How many secret cases do we have in this country, with people being banned from even saying that the case exists?

This is what we should be concerned about. It is not enough for us to be told by some lawyerly opinionator that:

Hemming seems to discount the possibility that the professionals involved may actually be genuinely trying to do what we pay them to do – protect young people like this. 

I know from experience that professionals do try to do their jobs well and to maintain their duty to the child. But that general observation - along with ad hominum attacks on John Hemming and others - is not sufficient to answer the specific charge. And that charge is that the family courts do not always behave properly and that these hyper-injunctions can be used - just as they are with footballers - to prevent the public knowing what the public should have the right to know.


By obsessing about the sins of celebrities, the media are providing a smokescreen for a substantive examination of these issues and, at the heart of them, the use of gagging orders to cover up the failings of public servants.

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Why Number 10 needs a direct marketing expert as well as a TV guru!

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I was struck by Guido Fawkes’ surprisingly thoughtful piece on the current vacancy at Downing Street:

Television will help most voters decide who gets the credit, not broadsheet editorial leaders. Cameron and Clegg are better television performers than Miliband, if they want to exploit that they should hire a director of communications who understands televisual imagery. The media grid planning can be done by Downing Street drones a plenty and Osborne has a good grip on political strategy. Television requires a certain genius. If they want to win over the voters they need a political maestro equivalent to Simon Cowell or Roger Ailes.

Now I agree with this – all the more since on-line activity is rapidly converging with the telly and video is going to be a hugely important communications tool in coming years. However, I think the TV guru needs a right-hand man with another skill set. Not the newspaper skills that tend to dominate spin doctoring nor the blue-sky strategising that many like but an altogether more fundamental set of skills – direct marketing.

Yes the TV image matters but the techniques and technology is headed towards response-based media again. And frankly most in the media and government communications world simply don’t get interactivity and direct response marketing.

So while he’s looking for a TV guru, Dave should also search for a response marketing expert – someone who understands the down-to-earth world of mail order, appreciates the magic words that get response and gets the world that Walter Weintz* described in “The Solid Gold Mailbox”.

Linked to a powerful TV image, such a campaign could transform the way we run political communications – we would combine the ‘common touch’ of TV with the power of effective direct marketing to break past the media gatekeepers and create a direct televisual relationship with the voter.

*Weintz was the man who made Readers’ Digest all those millions by the way!

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Go on Andy! Get yourself a blog...you know you want to!

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There’s been a slight frothing of the blogosphere in response to some comments made by Andrew Marr. Now, dear reader, since you are of a sensitive disposition I shall not share with you’re the full vituperation of the average pimply, basement-dwelling, social inadequate on the matter of Mr Marr’s parentage, ears, nose coloration, self-importance and general smugness – it’s all out there on many, many blogs.

Instead, my lovelies, I would rather consider quite why Mr Marr – and indeed other Initiates of the Media Elite – are quite so animated by bloggers. Not me of course since I write nothing of consquence and only write under the affluence of inkerhol. I’m also never up early enough to watch the stuff Mr Marr puts out – although I gather he has a corner in interviewing grand and important political figures on behalf of the BBC. So – since I’m good enough to hand over money for a TV Licence – I’m paying for Mr Marr to suck up to the great and good. And I’m a blogger (a rather poor excuse for one I know but a blogger nonetheless).

The truth is that pundits – and remember that this is what Andrew Marr is, he long ceased to be a journalist in any recognisable way – are threatened by bloggers. And not just by the Guido Fawkes of this world but by the great mass of questioning, doubting, opinion-forming and pomposity-pricking bloggers. It is these people who make Mr Marr’s programme so relevent not the tiny little audience he gets or the looping round of a selected clip on BBC News 24. Bloggers now shape how the world responds to what politicians say far more than does Mr Marr – and he doesn’t like it, just as Ian Hislop doesn’t like Guido, Bloggerheads and PSBook doing the job that, once upon a time, Private Eye used to do so well (before Ian became a celebrity rather than a journalist).

And, as we’ve seen with Iain Dale, Mark Pack and Will Straw, the blogger can produce fine interviews, insightful analysis and a level of detail seldom seem these days in the press or on TV. Moreover, describing the investigations of Wat Tyler, Anna Raccoon or Jack of Kent as anything other than fine ‘citizen journalism’ is to do them an insult and bloggers a further disservice. Most of us don’t do great stuff – we won’t be lining up for prizes, that’s for sure – but frankly there’s more interest, edge and excitement in what I read on-line than there is in the BBC’s entire current affairs production.

Rather than indulging in childish rants, the BBC’s grandees need to be thinking about how to work with bloggers to get more interesting, engaging and involving news reporting and current affairs discussion. Some of the leading newspaper journalists are now becoming successful bloggers – mostly because they’re good writers who know how to research a story. Perhaps Andrew Marr might like to sign up here and spend an hour of his day providing a little backgound, comments, thought and observation about his journalism – it would make him more interesting, would drive traffic to his TV show and would perhaps broaden his character beyond being ‘sycophant-in-chief’ for the Government’s media outlet.

Go on Andy...you know you want to!
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Whose fault is it?

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Well it’s the most important question, isn’t it? All those things happen – from the deepest tragedy to head-in-hands farce – and we are concerned with fault. Nothing can occur without some call for enquiry, investigation, exposure and – in the end – blame. Whose fault is it? Who is responsible? Which head should we impale on a pole?

We pick up the papers, turn on the radio, watch the telly – and what do we get? A shallow, accusatory, offensive culture of finger-pointing. We are not interested in what should be done to put things right – if that can be done. We care not one jot for the sensitivities of those suffering. We just want to see someone nailed to the door with a notice of blame and responsibility.

After many years of watching Newsnight almost religiously I realised that the character of the programme reflected a rotten, stinking and unpleasant truth about us all. We were enjoying watching a cynical journalist asking “when did you stop beating your wife” questions of politicians, pundits and other scum who crossed his path. We were not presented with an exploration of the truth but with an exercise in tripwires and elephant traps – an interview the sole purpose of which was to catch out the interviewee and make the interviewer look clever.

I don’t watch Newsnight any more.

I stopped reading newspapers when I realised – from bitter personal experience – that almost nothing contained therein was accurate, well-researched or informing. The journalist takes just one interest in what we have to say – the single line, the accusation, the plea, the blaming of others. That is the story – whether it be tragedy or low politics, show business or the life of a child. Today news reporting – just like our politics – is a sub-branch of the entertainment business. And what we really like is to see someone else squirm – to point our accusatory finger and say ‘there’s the person to blame.”

I turned to the on-line world – to the cornucopia of wonders that is the Internet. Perhaps there we will find something of what was lost. But not surprisingly that world is also filled with the casting of aspersions, with bullying, with the idle accusation easily made and above all with the laying of blame. Each day I read the same stuff – pointing fingers at one or other person for their supposed blameworthiness, endless calls for enquiry, for legal action and for people’s lives to be destroyed. All on a whim and at the touch of a button.

In all this sport – this festival of personal attack and accusation – we have lost sight of some of the really important things. If I lose my job, I can thrash around looking for someone else to blame for my predicament – the boss, the management, the economy, the Government. It’s a natural response – quite understandable in its way – but of no value to me or my family. My concern should be with what I do tomorrow not with why yesterday went wrong. Let’s suppose I can find someone to blame – where does that get me? I still have no job.

Don’t get me wrong I do care about responsibility. I think we should admit to our mistakes. And, on occasion, it is proper that those mistakes are punished. But let’s get a little balance? Let’s also give our attention to being accurate. To being understanding. And above all let’s give people space to explain, to tell their story.

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On-line news - the BBC is the problem not Murdoch

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There has been some debate about News International’s decision to put the new content of The Times behind a pay wall – to make us pay for “quality journalism” as dear old Rupert put it. Most of the views have tended to go something like this:

“It’s not going to work because we’ll get our news on-line from somewhere else. Doesn’t Murdoch realise that times have moved on. Duh!”

Or like this…

“We hate Rupert Murdoch and hope that his initiative fails so we finally get the chance to point our fingers at him, laugh and chant, ‘fail, fail, loser, loser’.”

I don’t know whether or not Murdoch’s decision will work but I’ve a suspicion that those clever online ‘experts’ will be shown up in the fullness of time. After all, journalism – quality or otherwise – has to be paid for somehow. It really is a simple as that and we should be asking how long The Guardian can be bailed out by the Scott Trust, whether the Telegraph’s ‘reader offer’ strategy will bring in the income and how many other newspapers will put their copy behind a pay wall over the next few years.

And then there’s the BBC. At present the BBC’s news is available free on-line (or rather ‘paid by the license fee’ online) and this undoubtedly acts as a malign drag on the development of an effective, sustainable on-line supply of information. So long as the BBC’s journalism is paid for by a poll tax on the populace, making us pay for news content on-line will present a challenge.

Murdoch’s criticisms of the BBC’s market-making activities and cross-subsidising of news on-line through are valid and we should pay more attention to them if we are interested in sustaining a free press. It’s hard not to agree with this from James Murdoch:

“The corporation is incapable of distinguishing between what is good for it, and what is good for the country. Funded by a hypothecated tax, the BBC feels empowered to offer something for everyone, even in areas well served by the market.”

It is the last part of Murdoch’s observation that should exercise us when thinking about on-line news. At present the BBC’s actions are preventing the development of a market by, in effect, forcing competing news providers to continue distributing their on-line content free. Again young Jimmy nailed it:

“Dumping free, state-sponsored news on the market makes it incredibly difficult for journalism to flourish on the Internet. Yet it is essential for the future of independent journalism that a fair price can be charged for news to people who value it. We seem to have decided to let independence and plurality wither. To let the BBC throttle the news market, and get bigger to compensate."

I hope The Times succeeds behind its paywall – it certainly deserves to for have the bravery to say that the emperor has no clothes and that if we want good journalism we have to pay for it.

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