UK elections

Welcome to ConDem(med) Britain

Tories, UK elections
Published on

Splinty’s dreams of a Lib-Lab coalition supported by the DUP have to remain only that, dreams, as Britain gets the government it didn’t want, after an election with no winner: a ConDem coalition:

Conservative leader David Cameron is the new UK prime minister after the resignation of Gordon Brown.

Mr Cameron, 43, entered 10 Downing Street after travelling to Buckingham Palace to formally accept the Queen’s request to form the next government.

He said he aimed to form a “proper and full coalition” with the Lib Dems to provide “strong, stable government”.

I’m once again glad not to live in the UK at this moment, when the best result that can be hoped for is a quick collapse of this ConDem coalition, followed by new elections, and the worst will be severe and harsh cuts to public services as Tory front benchers try to hide their erections at the thought of it..

Of course, with less than a month to our own elections, with Geert Wilders’ PVV poised to win big, I may envy you Brits shortly…

QotD: the uselessness of Nick Robinson

New Labour, Tories, UK elections
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D-Squared on the uselessness of Robinson and other supposed insiders in covering the coalition negotiations:

The fact that Labour and the LibDems were involved in negotiations all weekend seems to have come as a total surprise to political journalists. Shouldn’t this be the occasion for some serious carpetings by their editors? People like Nick Robinson, Adam Boulton and Andrew Rawnsley don’t cover stories and they don’t have specialist analytical skills. Their entire value-add is meant to be that they are “in the loop” and connected to all the big important players. If something as important as this can be happening without them knowing about it, that’s actually very embarrassing.

It should come as no great surprise that Robinson et all, for all their supposed connections, missed this story. The point about their connections is that they only ever are used to leak approved stories, usually semi-anonymously, with Robinson as conduit rather than active investigator, to influence whatever debate is taking place at a given moment. The value of a Robinson for politicians lies in the way in which they can make their positions clear without making them official, while to the news media the value lies in getting easily digestable news chunks with little risk of offending their news sources.

But if Robinson only reports what he gets given and is too polite to dig around on his own, the fact that he and others like him didn’t hear anything about these negotiations until they were made official is significant. It makes it likely that there were no rebels on either the Labour or the Lib-Dem side willing to leak this story in order to sabotage proceedings…

As an aside, the naivity with which the whole post-election negotiations are reported is charming if infuriating. There are plenty of European countries with experience of this sort of thing, why oh why can’t BBC or Sky News learn from their experiences what roughly to expect? Why pretend that the Liberal Democrats negotiating with both Labour and the Tories at the same time is shocking or wrong, when it’s perfectly normal to do so?

Attack of The Twitterati

Activism, Manufacturing consent, Media, TV, UK elections, UK politics
Published on 2 Comments on Attack of The Twitterati

What are they putting in Sky News‘ office coffee machine these days, crystal meth?

You’d think so, judging by the behaviour of Sky News presenters Adam Boulton and Kay Burley today….

But first a few words of explanation.

One of the most highly-trending topics on Twitter during the past day or so has been #don’tdoitnick. It’s been an attempt by twitterers to stop LibDem leader Nick Clegg forming an alliance with David Cameron’s Tories. Part of the action was a flashmob on College Green this afternoon.

It’s outside Parliament and always chosen by publicity hungry demonstrators, because a] it’s small and thus makes the protest look huge and b] it’s easy for the major media outlets to get to (especially as this afternoon, pre-El Gordo’s resignation announcement, they had bugger-all else to do).

In this YouTube video, Sky News presenter/reporter (I hesitate to dignify her with the title ‘journalist’ in this instance) Kay Burley interviews one of the protesters. She gets very shrill indeed, not to mention political, and starts shrieking at the quietly reasonable interviewee:

Sky, or rather Murdoch’s News Corp, supports the Conservatives, the party the twitterers are there to try and stop the LibDems forming a coalition with. If they were to form a coalition, the Tories could be the next UK government. There’s a palpable conflict of interest there, and Kay Burley’s not even making a pretence of being a disinterested reporter.

The protesters wouldn’t let it lie. “Sack Kay Burley! Sky News Is Shit!” – not only did they heckle her on live tv:

but before the end of the afternoon #sackkayburley became one of the top trending hashtags in the UK.

But it wasn’t just one shrieking Murdoch presenter – it was two. This wasn’t an isolated incident; cut to later the same day, and here’s Sky’s senior political reporter losing it in an interview with Blair’s former spin doctor Alistair Campbell:

(via Political Scrapbook, the best bit is at 4.00 min)

Boulton and Burley are hardly the Bill O’Reillys of UK tv, (USAnians would probably find their behaviour quite tame in comparison), but it’s clear to see that they are from the same stable.

All use the classic News Corp interview technique – shout loudly in order to drown out reasonable argument and if that doesn’t work, try to intimidate the interviewee out of challenging you further by the use of force majeure (ie turning off the camera).

But what these Murdoch employees really have in common is the whiff of panic they give off – it may be panic that they are no longer at the cutting edge of making and reporting news, or panic that any mere civilian should think they have the right to challenge them; or it could just be panic about the continuing existence of their jobs, as the news narrative (despite their blogs and online presence) slips out of their hands and into that of the public’s, via social networks and mobile devices. Or it may well be all of the above.

Whatever it is, it’s bloody good fun to watch.

UPDATE If only for completeness’ sake, here Boulton bollocks Ben Bradshaw.