It’s all go on the political reform front today. Apart from Nick Clegg’s op-ed in The Guardian, front page newspaper coverage, detailed policy proposals and new campaign website, there’s also the little matter of today’s party political broadcast, also on the same theme. It’s appearing on TV screens this evening, but you can watch it now:
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Recent Comments
Simon Robinson
It's good to have an MP putting herself forward for this. The manifesto seems a bit vague though. All good thoughts and nothing you can really disagree with, b...
Robin Bennett
I am sure Alan will have the sympathies of all of us. The situation is sad and frustrating. Forgive me for making one small point, Alan: you said that 40 Ho...
Jonathan Brown
@George - me too. I know that not everyone is happy about this, but it's perfectly reasonable policy and I think all care is being taken to try to reassure thos...
George Thomas
It follows the position of what I believe is a majority of UK population of supporting Israel but being against these unlawful settlements. Maybe not brave in t...
David Le Grice
I don't get your point. Starmer's problem was that he had no charisma or any broader understanding of how to be popular. Boris Johnson managed to deliver the ...
8 Comments
Good stuff. Really loving the takepowerback website as well, it’s a really good look. None of the horrible yellow 🙂
Would ring truer if Nick hadn’t claimed up to the hilt on his own second homes allowance.
Anyone else think this looks like a injury claims advert?
Wow! A euro election political broadcast and not a word about Europe!! I just got a tory leaflet through the door that 90% of it was relevant to EU issues.
No wonder the UK is drifting away from the European Dream, when even the supposedly pro EU party disgracefully treats the important elections influencing EU policy as a referendum on national politics.
Shameful cowardly politics that leaves us pro-european and internationalist liberals cold.
This echoes nearly everything that I experienced on the FE, point blank refusal by the Campaigns and leadership to campaign on Europe.
The second Clegg Roadshow PPB this year was heavily Euro-centric.
I don’t know what was originally planned for this one, but it was obviously filmed quickly as a replacement.
Well, I just got a ‘newspaper’ from the Tories talking about the economy, how awful Labour is, crime, how awful Labour is, education, Labour moral bankruptcy, Lib Dem defector, Labour’s failed economy, etc, etc. I could only find two explicit mentions of Europe (apart from a tiny ‘don’t forget to vote on June 4th!’ box), which were ‘let’s have a referendum on the Lisbon treaty’ and ‘let’s have a referendum on the Lisbon Treaty’ – making up about one tenth of the whole thing. It’s not done as part of the European campaign, but you’d have thought that a centrally created communication to be distributed in the weeks leading up to a European election would mention Europe more often. In the election communication, about a third of it is non-Europe related (most of it ‘let’s give Gordon a good kicking’). That’s for something that’s supposed to be explicitly concerned with the European elections.
Chris Davies’ leaflet and election communication, on the other hand, was entirely concerned with Europe. 100%. And, in all fairness, the communcations from No2EU, Labour, UKIP (of course) and the Greens have been similarly straight to the point – in their election communcations, apart from a bit of ‘Gordon Brown is the man of the hour’ stuff from Labour, they’ve been 100% focused on the Euros. The only other party to talk about domestic issues to the same extent was the BNP.
I have to disagree with you on this one, Donnachadh; as Benjamin said, the previous broadcast was heavily about Europe – it featured two issues, one local council-related, the other about the EU, and on both it confronted what are viewed as populist public views head-on.
The trouble is, in the current political climate, no-one’s listening to anything but ‘what are our MPs up to now?’ The party wanted to make the Euro-elections a face-off between us and UKIP, as Ed Davey valiantly attempted the other day, but unfortunately even UKIP have mainly been talking about expenses rather than Europe – the first time they’ve ever been caught saying *anything* else!
I thought Nick’s previous broadcast would have been very effective in an ‘ordinary’ campaign, but right now it risked looking out of touch. This one has a different style, different slogan (“Stronger Together” in the others was the first time I can remember a PEB slogan actually being about Europe) and entirely different message, which is a shame… But right, under the circumstances.
Pretending that we can carry on running the campaign we wanted to after the last fortnight’s disintegration of British politics would be like deciding carefully on the right slogan to wear on your t-shirt, then stepping out in nothing else when there’s a blizzard outside.
D McCarthy, the EU elections aren’t the only elections. There’s also local elections too.