Tag Archives: george bush

Helen Duffett

Parties on a war footing – but what are they fighting for?

By Helen Duffett | Sat 2nd January 2010 - 7:35 pm

New Year, old sabre-rattling. Gordon Brown and David Cameron are parading their leadership credentials, with a view to capturing an entire nation – the UK, that is.

David Cameron made a speech (transcript here) in Oxfordshire today saying that the country needs a change of direction and a new leadership:

“We can’t go on in these difficult times with a weak prime minister and a divided government.”

You can almost hear the Tory munitions factory roar as they forge this, strengthen that and defeat the other.

And here’s Gordon Brown on New Year’s Eve:

“The Detroit plot thankfully failed. But it has been a wake-up call for the ongoing battles we must wage not just for security against terror but for the hearts and minds of a generation.”

It’s a common political (and journalistic, and marketing) technique to play to people’s fears, but what next in the Prime Ministerial arms race – Brown and Cameron appearing on the decks of rival aircraft carriers, squeezed into military uniform à la George Bush?

Neither leader, for all their fighting talk, seems to have heard of liberty.

Continue reading »
Posted in Op-eds | Also tagged , , , , , and | 1 Comment
Mark Pack

Televised party leader debates: get your worms at the ready

By Mark Pack | Tue 29th December 2009 - 11:50 am

The “worm” is an instant poll tracker which wriggles across people’s TV screens, showing the net negative or positive reaction of a small group of the public to what is happening on screen. Running a worm across a politician’s speech or a debate between politicians has become a not uncommon feature of political coverage across many democracies.

The worm has even occasionally surfaced in the UK – so will it surface again for our TV party leader debates at the general election? And will worms offer a chance for Channel 4 to repeat an Australian trick and put one over the other channels who have excluded it from the debates?

Known in the US as dial groups (because a group of people is each given a dial to twist towards positive or negative), worms have often been the cause of controversy there. Joe Klein in Politics Lost recounts how badly they got the 2000 Bush-Gore debates wrong:

Continue reading »
Posted in News | Also tagged , , and | Leave a comment



Recent Comments

  • User AvatarEddie Sammon 21st May - 2:21am
    George, with respect, not everything in life is equal - being against same sex marriage is not equal to racism. I mean if we think...
  • User AvatarGeorge Potter 21st May - 1:53am
    I have sympathy for the idea that registrars should be allowed to swap with other registrars if they don't want to perform same sex marriages....
  • User AvatarMatthew Huntbach 21st May - 1:29am
    Tim Bale … judging by the lack of internal criticism of Clegg and co by their grassroots activists, the strategy has proved remarkably effective in...
  • User AvatarDavid Evans 21st May - 1:20am
    Well said Tony, Tolerance is one thing that is sadly missing in a large number of these posts from people who claim to be liberal,...
  • User AvatarTom Nicholson 21st May - 1:19am
    "The underlying problem in any open and democratic society based on human dignity, equality and freedom in which conscientious and religious freedom has to be...