politics

It’s not what you say, it’s who you are: my MP never tweets yet has 6x as many followers as me!

My MP has amassed six times as many followers on Twitter as I have – despite the fact that he never tweets! It just goes to show, it’s not what you say but who you are when it comes to gaining a Twitter following.

I discovered this when I decided to follow Tory Crispin Blunt (Reigate) only to find that he has not uttered a word since he commented “test” in September 2009. I and his other 352 followers are eagerly sitting by our PCs waiting for the next utterance from our parliamentary representative.

Blunt’s not alone in his lack of interest in the internet. His fellow Surrey Tory MPs Chris Grayling (Epsom and Ewell), Paul Beresford (Mole Valley), Jonathan Lord (Woking) and Dominic Raab (Esher and Walton), don’t appear to be on Twitter at all – though Raab is on Facebook.

Other Surrey MPs toy half-heartedly with Twitter; perhaps someone’s told them to do it but they’re not convinced. Kwasi Kwarteng in Spelthorne went through a spell of tweeting in the run-up to the elections in May last year but hasn’t uttered since.

Education minister Michael Gove of Surrey Heath has issued only 15 tweets, most of them last month.

Of the remaining Surrey MPs – all Conservatives – culture secretary Jeremy Hunt (south west Surrey), Anne Milton (Guildford) and Sam Gmiyah (East Surrey), are all active on Twitter. Gmiyah seems to be a particularly keen user.

I accept that being a social media user is not necessarily a qualification for being a good MP: Twitter is fairly new to all of us and we all managed our jobs perfectly well without it in the past. I daresay those MPs who don’t use it would say they are too busy handling parliamentary business or dealing with constituents’ problems to sit down and mess about on the internet. But it would certainly seem to be a way for politicians to raise their profiles and to communicate quickly and easily with constituents.

Be that as it may, I’m still a bit peed off that my 57 followers @susanfenton – actually not bad for a newbie and growing slowly but steadily all the time – can be so easily beaten hands down by someone who’s only ever tweeted once.

Blunt’s 353 followers pale into insignificance against higher profile politicians like Ken Livingstone, with 14,000, Diane Abbott, with 22,000, George Galloway, with 37,000, and avid tweeter and “cyber warrior” John Prescott, former Labour deputy leader, who has an astonishing 92,000 followers.

Ed Miliband, leader of the Labour Party, also has 92,000 while Nick Clegg, deputy prime minister and leader of the Lib Dems, has 65,000. Boris Johnson, London mayor, outdoes the lot of them with 192,000. Interestingly, David Cameron has only 6,000 in his own name, though 1.8 million as “prime minister”.

As a newcomer, I’ve totally revised my previous opinion of Twitter as being an outlet for the intellectually vacant to talk about what they had for breakfast. Some do Tweet frequent updates on what train or café or airport they’re in, apropos of nothing in particular. But if you want interesting, intelligent, challenging or alternative views – and instant, informative updates on topics that interest you, you can easily find them on Twitter. Maybe more MPs should try it.

PS Have just spotted that @PhilipHammondMP, which purports to be the Twitter account of transport secretary and MP for Runnymede and Weybridge Philip Hammond, is actually a spoof. Do go and have a look – he says some funny things, like “William Hague wears underpants made of tweed. He suffers terribly with chafing”.

Pic credit: Naypong, http://www.freedigitalphotos.net/images/view_photog.php?photogid=2617

Foreign Secretary fends off tweets about Libya and silly Qs about baseball caps & Bronski Beat

Foreign Secretary William Hague spent nearly an hour on Twitter this afternoon answering questions about the “intervention” in Libya, at #askFS.

See http://www.fco.gov.uk/en/news/latest-news/?view=News&id=649927082 for the transcript, just issued by the Foreign & Commonwealth Office.

He got quite a hard time, with most of those tweeting seeming to be at best sceptical about this latest war. Including me.

I asked “Wasn’t the real purpose of the invasion of Libya to gain control of the oil, by installing an unelected puppet government?”

Hague replied: “No. purpose was to prevent Qadhafi massacring innocent people & to support a better future for #Libya #askFS”

A childish oversimplification, and one that no-one truly believes. Hague’s Twitter-fest was touted as being a wonderful example of democracy in action. So democracy is being able to get a handful of 140-character answers to a large number of questions about complex issues. That’s our fast-food, sound-bite society for you.

If you followed the exchange, you couldn’t help but notice that Hague answered only some of the questions posed. The published transcript of the session would suggest that his office selected a handful of the easier questions, to which Hague could repeat nice easy platitudes about massacres of innocents.

Those many people who asked questions like those below will have been left deeply unsatisfied, I would imagine…

+ do you ever wonder that if Europe stopped selling so many weapons worldwide, you’d have less problems like #libya?

+ isn’t it ironic that previous arms deals to Libya means that you’re responsible for arming both sides in Libya

+ how can you pretend to humanitarian, despite the fact the UK has sanctioned arms sales to #Libya for the last 6-7 yrs?

+ how ironic do you think your name and the place you will be charged for illegal war crimes being one and the same is?

+ why was Britain still selling weapons to Arab dictatorships in February after the Arab spring had started? or at all.

+ Don’t you find it a tad ironic to be claiming to be bringing freedom & democracy abroad while suppressing it at home? #askFS i know i do

+ so bombing libyas free schools/hospitals is helping them how exactly?

It wasn’t all heavy political stuff though – there was some light relief from some wits who appeared to see Hague as a figure of fun that they could poke with a stick for the amusement of anyone hanging about on the internet. One asked: “What made you go into politics after you left Bronski Beat?” while another wanted to know if Hague ever regretted wearing “that” baseball cap.

He was also asked:

+ what are your favourite biscuits?

+ What’s your 8^th favourite Kajagoogoo song?

+ What’s the capital of Moldova?

+ do you agree that David Cameron looks a bit like C3PO but made out of spam? If not, why not?

As you can imagine, these were among the many questions the Foreign Secretary left unanswered. So we’re no further forward in any respect. Anyhow, Hague signed off half an hour or so ago, apparently for a phone chat with the Libyan rebels, but the questions at #askFS continue to come in.

Pic credit: Foreign & Commonwealth Office, http://www.flickr.com/photos/foreignoffice/

Manifestations of anger when peaceful protest doesn’t work

There are some very angry people out there. I’m not talking about those involved in the disturbances of the past few days – I’ll come to those later.

I’m talking about ordinary, common-or-garden, white, middle-class, middle-aged people, the sort you wouldn’t think of as trouble-makers.

They’re angry because of massive and unnecessary cuts to things they hold dear – the health service, the welfare state, education, social services.

They see their pensions becoming worthless, they see their kids about to take on £27,000 of debt in order to gain degrees that have no guarantee of ever getting them a job, they see their own parents’ future uncertain as care homes are closed and social services budgets cruelly slashed. They see their local libraries closing, spending in youth services and care for the elderly, mentally ill and vulnerable pruned back savagely. They see a future in which, at a time they should be relaxing in relative comfort, they will more than likely have to share their homes with – and support financially – their jobless children and their enfeebled parents.

It’s a slow-burning anger. The government and the mass media tells them the cuts are necessary and for a while they believe it. But gradually they start to question this: why should they shoulder the financial burden while the rich get richer and the greedy corporations slyly avoid their tax burdens? Why are we as a nation continuing to wage fantastically expensive wars that appear to be for no real purpose, to achieve nothing, to put our troops and our citizens into needless danger? How, they ask, can we afford to keep waging war when we are hugely overdrawn as a country, in hock to foreign investors to the tune of billions, and as a result cannot afford to pay for essential, day-to-day services for our own people?

And they get more and more angry.

If you can understand this anger, you must understand how that anger is multiplied in communities hardest hit by the cuts. I’m not going to bandy figures around – the figures for the cuts to public services in the areas affected are freely available from local councils on the internet – but they’re scary. People who have little already are being deprived of much of what they do have.

No-one is able to explain why violent disturbances on the streets of Tunisia, Egypt and Libya are described as “anti-government protests” and those involved described as “rebels”, when similar events here are described as “riots” and those involved are vilified as “yobboes and criminals”. There have even been frighteningly fascist-overtoned threats of evicting protesters from their homes and depriving them of their benefits. As one Tweeter put it tonight, “people calling for authoritarian measures never think it applies to them or anyone that they know”.

Another reminds those “baying for water cannons and  rubber bullets” that those instruments could be turned on them in other circumstances. And a Tweet from the US points out that, in a parallel with what’s happening here, “the United States spends more than $780 billion on war each year and less than $10 billion on improving housing in the ghettos”.

The sad fact is that peaceful protest doesn’t work, as millions of people have found when they’ve taken to the streets to protest against the wars that are bankrupting our country and against the cuts that are being forced through in order to keep paying for these wars. Time and time again, the media has ignored the tens of thousands of “normal” people who attend each rally, most with great good humour and many with their children, and focused on the minority trouble-makers, in order to perpetuate the myth that dissent is somehow a minority sport.

What happens when polite protest doesn’t work? People get angry. And we’re seeing, to our cost, how such anger can manifest itself and how quickly it can spread.

“This sense of anger has been brewing for years,” commented a young black man on Twitter tonight. “We are all stereotyped as thugs hoodies criminals mobs gangs crews… It’s funny how [the] media portrayed it [the riot] as a minority of poor black youths when we now see other ages, classes, races in court facing justice.”

You can’t quell anger, or any other disease, by attacking its symptoms, you have to treat its root causes. That’s not condoning violence or justifying it – it’s common sense if you don’t want it to keep erupting. This week it’s the inner cities – what happens when the increasingly angry middle classes finally lose their temper?

Pic credit: HalaLoCa, http://twitpic.com/626h3a

New leader Larry gets his claws into government duties

As a cat lover it would be rude of me not to use this pic of Larry, the Downing Street cat, hosting a Cabinet meeting. Larry, it seems, is currently in charge of the UK after our most senior politicians buggered off on holiday, leaving various calamitous economic events to unfold in their wake.

The pic has been circulated by serial Tweeter John Prescott (senior Opposition politician, for any foreigners reading), who has managed to get #wheresthegovernment to “trend” on Twitter these past couple of days. There have been masses of witty comments on this thread, along the lines of “I’ve just been to Ikea, I can put a cabinet together” [geddit?!!?] and “I can draw, can I be Minister for the Arts?”

There’s even been a caption competition, with a prize for the best caption for the pic. My favourite is “8 out of 10 cabinet members (who showed a preference) said that they deserved a holiday”. I also liked “Unpopular guest speaker at the Ailurophobic summer conference”.

I had been planning to whitter on tonight about my disproportionate excitement at getting my first comment on my blog, but I got all distracted at seeing a picture of a cat. Anyway, to cut a long s. short, I received my first proper “comment” – it was Spam really, in that the guy had presumably posted the same thing all over the internet, but it was interesting, and I like interesting. The guy is a campaigner against routine circumcision and posted a whole heap of links to informative sources on the subject. I was baffled at first as to why he’d visited my site, till I remembered I used the word “circumcision” in a post that was actually about something else. If nothing else, this foreskin aficionado demonstrated that my site is search engine optimised! When I’ve got nothing else to do I’ll take a look at some of his pictures, but I’m about to have my tea, so I’d best leave it till my stomach’s less full.

Which brings me back to poor Larry – I hope his stomach’s full too and that the prime minister left someone in charge of feeding the poor wee mite.