So one day I just logged on to Facebook as usual, and there it was: a bar across the bottom of the page proclaiming the birth of Facebook Chat. A click on a button on it, and up pops a list of all my Facebook friends who are currently online, offering me the opportunity for online chat with them just from another click.

At a time when every online community or system there is seems to be offering a chat facility, I guess it’s hardly surprising that Facebook is following suit.

And in fact I think Facebook is in many ways ideally suited to making the most of chat. One of the main reasons I don’t use chat more often is that I don’t have very many of my friends on other chat systems (maybe this is just me because I don’t really know how to get more on to them), and I think a limited number of friends are indeed on those systems.

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I have been asked to set down for a group of people what I think their members need to do in order to get selected in future internal party selection contests to winnable positions on Lib Dem party lists, and I thought it might be of wider interest – perhaps for candidates from ethnic minorities, or women, other under-represented groups, or just any prospective candidate – so I am sharing it here.

I should emphasise that although it’s me that is writing this up here, the wisdom (such as it is) is generally not my own – it represents a well-trodden path of candidates who have gone on to be successful.

I should also say that it is a demanding path, and, personally, not one I am myself choosing to follow at the moment (I currently do some elements of what follows, but not others). But having been asked to outline it for people who are interested in going down this road, from observing plenty of others I’m pretty clear that something very like what follows is what you need to do if you want to get selected.

The essential point is that successful campaigns to get selected don’t start when the official campaigning period starts, or even when the whole selection process begins, but years beforehand. With the 2008 London-wide elections now out of the way last week, now is an excellent time for anyone aiming to try and get elected to it in 2012 to start work (in fact I suspect it’s likely that most of those who will be successful in 2012 have already started work, but now is certainly not too late to join them with a hope of success).

So, things the aspirant candidate needs to do are:

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The liberal conscience in me would very much like to think that there will be consequences for the Evening Standard for the way it has behaved over the last few weeks. For the duration of the campaign it has turned itself from a relatively respectable newspaper with some journalistic integrity, with a generally right of centre agenda, into a full-scale campaigning newspaper for Boris Johnson. Its headlines, and perhaps most powerfully of all the billboards it has prominently displayed around London, have carried headlines which would have shamed the writers of the most partisan party campaigning literature for their cheerful disregard for balanced fact.

This matters, of course, because the Evening Standard is the only proper newspaper in London (for those who aren’t familiar with the rather odd newspaper situation in London, there is also one morning paper, and two afternoon ones, all distributed free on the Tube, two of the three of which are lite versions of the Standard itself, and all three of which are broadly speaking rubbish).

Now I don’t have a problem with the right of anyone to run a newspaper and through it promote a particular political agenda – and I certainly don’t think there is a strong case for extending to newspapers, even monopolistic ones like the Standard, the requirements for impartiality which are (rightly) imposed on broadcasters.
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My post suggesting that, despite all the reasons for not doing so, there might perhaps be something to be said for voting for Boris Johnson as Mayor of London, as some kind of vaccination against a future Conservative Government, attracted quite a lot of criticism in Lib Dem circles. Jo Christie-Smith, for example, made a good critique of this position on her blog (apologies to Jo that for some reason I don’t understand Wordpress won’t let me link to her blog, but if you put her name into Google, it comes up pretty quick!).

In fact I wasn’t firmly saying that I thought anti-Conservatives should necessarily vote for Johnson, just highlighting the dilemma – and for the record, my own second preference on Thursday went to Livingstone.

I remain firmly of the view that a Boris Johnson London mayoralty is bad news for London – my concern limited only by the fact that the Mayor of London’s powers are in fact pretty limited. Talk of the job being that of ‘running London’, while perhaps understandable, are very wide of the mark. Even of those aspects of running London which lie in the public sector’s hands, few lie with the Mayor – he has no influence at all on health, for example, almost none on schools, not much on the green agenda (despite Ken’s generally admirable efforts to expand its power in this area), very little on waste (despite Ken’s more unsuccessful efforts here too), and very little even such London bete noires as parking. Public transport, policing, some aspects of housing, and major planning issues are the only really important areas the Mayor has real control of. And even in these areas he has to find agreement with a multitude of government departments, local councils and various other bodies (even if you live here you may well never have heard of the Government Office for London or GOL, but it is not too far from the truth to say that this government quasi-department exists largely in order to prevent the Mayor and 33 Boroughs from doing things that central government doesn’t really want them to do).

On the question of whether a Boris Mayoralty is good for the greater Conservative cause or not, it is fairly clear that the Conservative hierarchy, if not quite sharing my views precisely on the merits or otherwise of Boris Johnson, did have some concern about how he might perform as Mayor, and indeed how he was already showing as the Conservative candidate. The role of Australian Conservative spinmeister Lynton Crosby in sorting out the Conservative Mayoral campaign, and specifically sitting on Johnson, has been fairly widely discussed.

Boris’s first few pronouncements since his election confirm that he has behind him a strong team who are determined to control what he says pretty closely. Read the rest of this entry »

We citizens of this extraordinary and amazing city will be going to the polls on 1 May to elect ourselves a new Mayor. The polls of the last few weeks have seemed to indicate that this year Londoners really have finally had enough of Ken Livingstone. Personally I still find that difficult to believe: the man who is so far the only person to have held this post is one of politics’ great survivors – and more importantly the issues that have made the headlines about him so far – City Hall intrigues about how a couple of tiny organisations were funded, and how many children he has – seem to me like the sorts of issues which get journalists and political opponents excited, but have no real impact on the lives, and therefore the voting intentions, of normal voters.

It’s no surprise that I will be voting for Brian Paddick – he has a track record of innovative leadership on the London-wide stage, and perhaps more importantly, of doing so in a way which is popular with the local community. He would make a good Mayor. And he comes without Ken’s voluminous political baggage – encompassing everything from campaigning from low transport fares in the 80s to introducing record high ones in the 21st century, from doing odd deals with revolutionary leftwing South American presidents to being one of the biggest fans of City plutocrats.

But then of course there is the second preference choice to be made. And here I stumble across a dilemma which I actually think now faces (even if we haven’t realised it yet!) all Londoners who don’t want to see a Conservative government after the next General Election – which is most of us.

To be clear to start with: I think Boris Johnson would be a complete disaster as Mayor. His various performances over the last few months have entirely satisfied me that underneath the external appearance of a clowning buffoon, there lies in fact….a clowning buffoon. I don’t think he’s really interested in being Mayor of London, and when he did have to make a decision on something, I don’t doubt for a moment that he would do it based on what he thinks would be the interests of him and his friends rather than the interests of London as a whole. He is a true Conservative and I don’t think he should be entrusted with government.

I’m confident that within a few short months it would be clear what a disaster his mayoralty would be – and indeed a taste of what a Cameron Conservative government would be like.

And this is where it becomes a dilemma.

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I’ve kept up a bit of running commentary on this blog about the purpose and development of Facebook, and online social networking more generally - and Facebook does indeed still seem to be the place to be, especially for keeping up with distant old friends or contacts.

There have been some intimations of its mortality, however: although it’s been said for some time that there are more Londoners on FB than there are of any other city, this number apparently recently suffered its first monthly fall. And my teenager-with-her-finger-on-the-pulse friend recently declared that she thought Facebook was past its peak.

From its still-burgeoning popularity with everyone from MPs to companies and other organisations, large and small, you might not get this impression - but then the moment when large numbers of such people start getting involved is probably also the moment when some of its core audience start losing interest in it. Having said that, people over 40 who actually use their own profile on FB (rather than have their secretary run it for them) are still relatively rare. I don’t think it’s going to go away - it is simply too useful (and for useful things as well, not only for ’sending’ weird drinks to other people, and ranking which of your acquaintances’ acquaintances are better looking, and other such FB staples), and it remains far easier and nicer to use than any of its competitors - but perhaps it has peaked.

But if Facebook is slowing up, then one networking site which seems to be speeding up at the moment is LinkedIn. Read the rest of this entry »

We frequently decry this government for making us perhaps the most spied-on nation on earth, ever. And having got hold of our extremely valuable information, they have then managed to use it to put us at risk - which as Nick said in his speech in Liverpool last Sunday, if it weren’t so serious would be laughable from a government that at the same time was advising us all to buy personal home shredders to protect our personal information.

But the ways in which they’ve put our information at risk are not only through their own actions - but also by allowing other people, who are even more cavalier with it than they are, to insist that we give it to them too.

I’ve highlighted before (George Bush knows your credit card number) the large amount of information which the American government insists on knowing about anyone before they can travel to the USA - as well as the fact that they have no real grasp of the concept of protecting that information once they’ve got it.

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Over the last few weeks there’s been a fair bit of heat generated by the suggestion that Tony Blair is interested in trying to become the first occupant of the post of President of the European Council, created by the Lisbon Treaty.

A lot of people seem very opposed to this - there appear to be no fewer than eight different Facebook groups of people opposing it (here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here), a website and a petition for you to sign.

Personally I can’t get too excited about fighting Blair on this. It may well be that, particularly following his actions on Iraq, he is not the person to take on such an important role on behalf of the EU’s 27 national governments - and that does seem to be the view of a good many of them at the moment. But I think there would also be some benefits (not only to Britain but to the EU as a whole) in having a Brit in that role - not least because it might help the British public to see the EU as a useful way of helping to achieve objectives that the British public (and those of other European countries) want to see achieved, rather than just of creating endless pointless interfering bureaucracies, which is what they largely seem to think it is there for at the moment.

I am more struck by some of the ironies of Blair going for this position.

Firstly, this is a post that will exist at all largely because Blair’s government argued for it, through the Convention. There is clearly some irony (which I have not seen picked up that widely recently) in the main proposer of this role becoming its first occupant - even if this seemed to some of us a distinct possibility at the time. Indeed I wrote here in March 2002 of this role when it was first proposed that its “working title [is] ‘the Tony Blair job’”.

A second irony is that Blair only wants this job if it can be made to be sufficiently important and powerful (and he is going round saying so, much as Paddy Ashdown did with his prospective Afghan job - in this case there may well be several prospective Karzais around the place willing to use their veto). This is consistent with his desire to create a powerful European Council President in the first place, and with his apparent view that government in general, and the EU in particular, needs someone who is in a genuinely powerful position to lead it if it is to achieve things.

But the man now arguing that there should be such a genuinely powerful President of the European Council is the very same person who, when Prime Minister of the UK, consistently fought against almost any extension of the ability of the EU to act effectively together - what he now wants this person to do.

If someone had demanded a few years ago the sort of powers that prospective President Blair is now insisting on for this role, then Prime Minister Blair would have had a fit.

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