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.

Read the rest of this entry »

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:

Read the rest of this entry »

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.
Read the rest of this entry »

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 »