Tag Archives: seth reznik

Mark Pack

Progressive London: a front to elect Ken Livingstone?

By Mark Pack | Sun 25th January 2009 - 8:54 pm

Yesterday Progressive London held a day-long conference in, appropriately enough, London. The organisation was created by Ken Livingstone following his defeat in the last London Mayor election with the stated aim of building a broad coalition of people who share progressive views and oppose Boris Johnson and his policies. (Alix wrote an excellent post earlier today on the thorny question of quite what progressive means.)

Why did Ken Livingstone found Progressive London?

Ken Livingstone himself has been keen to present the organisation as being neither a Labour front nor a front for a future bid from himself to become Mayor once again, as for example in his interview with The Guardian, timed to coincide with the conference:

The “once and future mayor,” as Livingstone has been known to describe himself, rebuts the suggestion that Progressive London is a five-syllable synonym for the Re-elect Ken campaign and his planned journey back to his natural habitat of City Hall.

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Posted in London | Also tagged , , and | 12 Comments
Mark Pack

British politics and the internet: why I disagree with Seth Reznik

By Mark Pack | Fri 23rd January 2009 - 2:48 pm

Blue State Digital (BSD), one of the key firms behind Barack Obama’s campaign, is certainly an impressive outfit which gets the internet. But that makes all the more surprising the piece published today on The Guardian website by Seth Reznik about British politics and uses of the internet.

Let’s take a few quotes:

Ken Livingstone, despite his disappointing loss, was one who learnt those lessons. Working with BSD, his campaign set out a range of ways in which barriers to involvement could be torn down. Instead of hiding activist events behind password-protected firewalls, any Londoner could find information about ways to …

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Posted in London and Online politics | Also tagged and | 5 Comments
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