Tag Archives: Labour Party

It’s high time Labour started thinking up a tech policy

I had an interesting discussion this morning in Oslo with an old friend (Hallstein Bjercke) and his colleague at IKT Norge, Torgeir Waterhouse. IKT is the trade association for the Norwegian IT sector, and Hallstein and Torgeir work on IT and tech policy questions with Norwegian politicians on a daily basis.

Hallstein, knowing I’m a member of the Labour Party, posed me a simple enough question: what is the UK Labour Party’s tech policy at the moment? And was I in some way involved in shaping it?

So what is the answer?

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When is Labour party debate going to catch up with the internet reality?

Shattering - CC / Flickr

Shattering - CC / Flickr

“Newspapers / the media / leafletting / canvassing [delete as applicable] are surely the least of his problems!”

Can you really imagine a UK political activist saying any of those four possible phrases about the campaign for someone running for mayor of a London borough, and not leaving themselves open to ridicule for the comment? Yet put ‘website’ in there at the start and that’s precisely the sort of reaction I’ve received (mostly on Facebook) to my earlier post that Helal Abbas, Labour candidate for mayor of Tower Hamlets, had no website.

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Amplifying an event through social media (or not) – lessons from #lab10

Water ripple - CC / Flickr

Water ripple - CC / Flickr

I’m a big fan of using social media – particularly Twitter (via one of more hash tags) and blogs – during large events and conferences.

The event itself, the speakers’ presentations, are like a rock being dropped into a pool, and the social media reactions are the ripples going out from that – weaker, but spreading further than the event itself.

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Brown: back him or sack him, but definitely do not dither

OK, here we go again. I’ve lost track of the number of times that there have been weak and weedy attempts to ditch Gordon Brown over the last 9 months or so. This time things are perhaps a little bit different – the Hoon-Hewitt plot is open and on the record, and they are at least both former cabinet ministers, although they claim this is no coup attempt against Gordon Brown – it could equally strengthen Brown were he to win such a poll of MPs. This then prompted a typical sort of tribalist response, typified by this tweet from Labour candidate for Manchester Withington Lucy Powell:

Look Lucy and anyone else trying to defend that line in public – it’s a load of crap. Labour is not united behind Brown. It’s not united behind anyone as an alternative to Brown either. People might not be behind Hoon and Hewitt (and especially not their timing), but there’s scarcely any Labour person I know that doesn’t have some sort of misgivings about Brown’s leadership. There’s no way to gloss over that. To do so is futile. But, conversely, what I write does not necessarily mean that Brown is not the best person to lead Labour into the election.

That leads me to the conclusion that I am not especially bothered about whether Brown is now ousted or not, and I say this as someone who joined Labour at the age of 16 and still carries the card. If Brown is ousted then a new leader will have too little time to change things much. If Brown stays then Labour will potter ahead towards an election with a wounded leader. Either option is rather sub-optimal.

All I want is some sort of quick decision, some clear line about what is going to happen. No rumbling news stories for days on end. This must be the very last effort to deal with the leadership question before the election. And after that – with a bit of luck – some sort of pragmatic, policy based approach that activists can use in the run up to the election can be developed. Remember the Tories will outspend Labour 3-1.

MPs in the corridors of Westminster: please think of the country, please avoid the crass soundbites about unity, and – above all – do not dither, whatever way the decision goes.

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In the postmodern putsch you have to move the victim somewhere – so where for Brown?

Gordon Brown at the World Economic Forum - CC / Flickr

Gordon Brown at the World Economic Forum - CC / Flickr

If you don’t like a politician what do you do with him or her? International organisations are always an option. Could this work for Labour and Gordon Brown?

Let me explain.

Brussels is full of national politicians who no longer had a role in their national capitals; Neil Kinnock was a Commissioner when he reached the end of the road in the UK. Barroso is kept in Brussels precisely because the Portuguese government doesn’t want him back home.

The same applies in other international bodies – Sarko favoured socialist Dominique Strauss-Kahn for the IMF to remove a potent enemy from the French political system. Pascal Lamy is equally out of harm’s way in the WTO.

Yet all of the focus in the UK about the future of Gordon Brown has been not about the Prime Minister himself and the debate has almost uniquely focused on whether there is enough discontent in the cabinet to depose him. I think it’s high time to think of options for a smooth transition out of power for Brown – essentially to find some other role he could be ushered into, something that would make the ending of his time as PM look less like a disaster.

Brown is not liked in Brussels, and he doesn’t really like Brussels either. So an EU role is not a way out. But apparently Brown’s moral compass is locked on international issues and development, so could a role be found for him in the IMF, World Bank or maybe even the WTO or the UN? Lamy, Strauss-Kahn and Zoellick are not up for reselection any time soon as far as I can tell, and it’s not clear whether there could be any sort of UN role. But some creative thinking needs to be done in this regard. If Brown were not condemned to the political wilderness (and even managed a role of greater repute than the king’s in the middle east) then surely the job of Mandelson, Johnson and Miliband would become so much easier?

(Thanks to Andy Carling for the inspiration for this post, over a beer in Brussels this evening)

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