@SarahBrown10 now UK’s top Tweeter
The Prime Minister’s wife, Sarah Brown, has overtaken Stephen Fry as the top high-profile Tweeter. Though she is still short of musician Lily Allen.
The Guardian reported that the number of followers keeping up with Brown’s tweets amounts to almost five times the entire Labour party membership.
Research by the University of Plymouth found:
- Gender – women MPs are more likely to tweet. While they compose just 19.4% of the Commons they make up 29.4% of tweeters.
- Party – Labour has 54.2% of all MPs, and provides 66.7% of tweeting MPs. The Liberal Democrats have only 9.8% of all MPs, but provide 17.6% of all tweeting MPs. The Conservatives have 29.8% of all MPs, but provide only 11.8% of tweeting MPs.
- Portfolio – 43.1% of tweeting MPs are either Government Ministers or Official Opposition spokespersons.
Who hates the “Mansion tax”?
The Lib Dem ‘Mansion Tax’ policy could hardly have been presented more ineptly. The person who announced it hadn’t told his colleagues about it, and wasn’t able to answer simple questions about how it would actually work.
Furthermore, as with any policy which attempts to get rich people to pay more tax, there was a lot of very hostile coverage by the rich people who own and write in newspapers.
And yet for all that, I am willing to bet that if an opinion pollster asked people “Do you support or oppose a ‘Mansion Tax’ on homes worth over £1 million?” then a majority would support it, and if you asked “Do you think the government should introduce a new tax on homes worth over £1 million to pay for income tax cuts for lower and middle earners?” then an even bigger majority would support it.
Maybe one of those newspapers which has been telling us what an electoral disaster the policy would be will commission a poll and we could find out.
Your new MPs – also PR consultants
A Conservative parliamentary candidate felt so uneasy about helping to give a company access to a member of the Shadow Cabinet that she is giving her four-figure fee to charity.
Margot James, the Conservative candidate for Stourbridge and a party vice-chairman, set up the meeting in her role as a freelance public relations consultant. But Ms James said that she would be donating her fee to a charity in the constituency.
…
Still more say that they have been asked to provide advice on the direction of the party. A few admit to having pressed the case of commercial interests among Shadow ministers. Other than Ms James, none felt that they had done anything wrong. Priti Patel, the Conservative candidate for Witham and formerly a senior aide to William Hague, has returned to the firm of Weber Shandwick, whose clients include Barclays, since being selected in November 2006.
“I don’t do lobbying,” she said. “However, that does not mean I won’t phone up a Member of Parliament and say this client or that has an issue and would you be willing to speak with them? I will also give my clients a particular insight into the party.”
Academics: sexist and out of touch
By now most of you will have picked up on Dr Kealey of Buckingham University’s disgusting piece in the Times Higher Education supplement this week, in which he advises university lecturers to treat their female students as ‘perks’, and enjoy watching the little hussies ‘flaunt their curves’. (KJB has a brilliant satire on the whole fiasco over at Get There Steppin’).
Addressing his article to the only members of the academic profession who really count – straight, male ones – Kealey advises his chums to have fun flirting, because everyone knows that ‘normal’ young women are more interested in men than in their education:
Normal girls – more interested in abs than in labs, more interested in pecs than specs, more interested in triceps than tripos – will abjure their lecturers for the company of their peers, but nonetheless, most male lecturers know that, most years, there will be a girl in class who flashes her admiration and who asks for advice on her essays. What to do?
“Enjoy her! She’s a perk.
Tories already politically interfering with the BBC
Outrageous. The Media Guardian reports:
The shadow culture secretary, Jeremy Hunt, said today that the BBC should recruit more Tories to its news division in order to counter an “innate liberal bias”.
Hunt, speaking at a Broadcasting Press Guild lunch today, said the BBC had acknowledged that those who wanted to work there had centre-left views and quoted its former political editor, Andrew Marr, who in 2007 described the corporation as having an “innate liberal bias”.
They may like to offer a cuddly image but the new Tories really are frothing-at-the-mouth conspiracy theory wingnuts.
Andrew Marr made one comment, which is contradicted by a whole bunch of other comments showing right-wing bias at the BBC, and yet the keep trotting out this rubbish.
And just to be clear:
When Marr was asked about his liberal bias comment by the House of Lords select committee on communications in November 2007, he said: “Every time I talk about this I get into terrible trouble. I think if there is a bias, it is cultural and not party political.”
Clearly when Tories read ConservativeHome they agree with the commenters that immigrants make up 60% of the country, asylum seekers get all the housing and Damian McBride is sitting behind every BBC programme pulling the strings. But the rest of the country isn’t stuck in the 1970s any more. It’s socially liberal now – get over it.
What Jeremy Hunt is doing here is trying to use Marr’s comments just so he can pressure the BBC to recruit more politically friendly frothing-at-the-mouth Tories. It’s meddling – plain and simple. If the Prime Minister had said he wanted the BBC to employ more Labour biased journalists to interview him these people would be screaming blue murder. But this is alright because the BBC is apparently run by revolutionary Marxists.
More reading
Duncan Stott: Jeremy Hunt: BBC-Bashing Coward
Sarah Ditum: Jeremy Hunt and the BBC: your ballot or your job
Why councils must ban the Daily Mail!
"Town hall bans staff from using Facebook after they each waste 572 hours in ONE month," proclaimed a recent Daily Mail headline.
This was an astonishing revelation: Portsmouth City Council workers were so addicted to the social networking website that they had broken the space-time continuum – compressing 19 hours of surfing into each working day.
Alas, the reality was more mundane. 572 hours was in fact the total usage for all 4,500 of Portsmouth’s employees. Individual use was a less physics-defying seven minutes a month – or 14 seconds a day. And that was during the peak month; average daily use was 11 seconds.
The Daily Mail subsequently amended its headline, though not before receiving a good deal of ridicule in its readers’ comments. (The original headline still appears at the TaxPayers’ Alliance website, whose prolific cut-and-pasting shows a cavalier disregard for such pillars of capitalism as intellectual property rights.)
continue reading… »
Tory cuts would push unemployment to 5m
Professor David Blanchflower launched an attack on the economic plans of George Osborne, the shadow chancellor, claiming they would create a “lost generation” of workers.
He said that any cuts in public spending could force unemployment up from its current 2.5 million to four million over the coming years.
But in a message aimed directly at Mr Osborne, he warned that his plan for accelerated action to bring down the £175 billion state deficit would force joblessness up further.
Just days after Prime Minister Gordon Brown accepted the need for cuts once recovery is in place, Prof Blanchflower suggested that they should be put off until at least 2012.
Labour: losing friends in the north
For generations, the default assumption of southerners meeting northerners has been that they are likely to be Labour supporters.
There always have been pockets of Toryism at positions further up the M1 than Londoners usually care to go, from the rolling farmlands of the East Riding to the Cheshire stockbroker belt, of course.
But they were more than outweighed for by solid ranks of proletarian steelworkers, miners, textile workers and shipbuilders. Yorkshire, Lancashire and Tyneside rank among the historic cradles of Labourism.
These have been the bastions of ‘our people’, the ones who voted Labour in 1979. The ones who voted Labour in 1931, for that matter.
Until now.
continue reading… »
What the left has to fear from Ashcroft / PoliticsHome
A lot of the reaction to the resignations from PoliticsHome, listed on LibCon, has been interesting a> and entertaining. It has also missed the point, in my view.
I won’t go into Michael Ashcroft’s own affairs; they’ve been detailed all over the place. And I think it would be safe to bet the Tories won’t do anything tax havens or press their deputy chairman over his tax/ legal status. But that’s not the issue here.
Will Ashcroft directly influence PoliticsHome or ConservativeHome? I think he’d be foolish too. And he’s not a foolish person. That influence is more likely to be through osmosis, as Sunder Katwala points out, in the style of Rupert Murdoch (who’s newspapers all concidentally supported the Iraq war).
So why buy them?
This is where I think most of my peers miss the point, especially Mark Hanson, Jag Singh and Political Scrapbook, who think he will do hard-hitting TV ads. Erm no: he didn’t pay all that moolah for some camera-men.
continue reading… »
Have third of Americans become too extreme?
Is extremism becoming mainstream in 21st century American politics?
Our latest national poll would seem to say yes- 35% voters in the country either think that Barack Obama was not born in the United States or that George W. Bush intentionally allowed the 9/11 attacks to occur so that we could go to war in the Middle East. A very troubled 2% of the population buys into both of those conspiracy theories.
It’s hard to call a third of the country a fringe.
Only 59% of Americans say confidently that they think Barack Obama was born in the country while 23% think he was not, and 18% are unsure. Among Republicans there are more voters- 42%- who think he was born somewhere else than there are- 37%- who will say for sure that he was born here.
…. more at Public Policy Polling
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