The Wardman Wire

Here is my digest of the Local Election 2008 news that no one seems to have covered yet: BNP, Greens, Wales, How did Blogging go?, innovations, where next for Labour, and the need to watch the government in their Fin de Siecle period.

London

I’m not calling London; I’m hoping that Garbo wll do that.

BNP

Within 10 miles of here, at Amber Valley, we have another 2 BNP councillors. Not good.

Greenery

The Green Party are reporting 5 net gains in seats. Still some way to do, as it can all be reported in 2 screenfuls.

Wales

An earthquake in Wales by the sound of it. Here are the Council control totals.

(2007 figures in brackets)

* Conservative: 2 (1)
* Independent Control: 0 (3)
* Labour: 2 (8)
* Liberal Democrat: 0 (0)
* No Overall Control: 15 (9)
* Plaid Cymru: 0 (1)
* Results still Pending: 3
* Results in June: 1

I reported the full detail earlier .

Blogging

I don’t think blog coverage has advanced much from 2007. We are missing 18 Doughty Street badly. I have only seen perhaps two innovative uses of applications of blogging. Here are the ones I spotted.

Chat room

Guido used Cover it Live to run a lively chatroom on his blog. Much more lively than the one I ran last year on the then brand new Wardman Wire. My chatroom this year had a technical clash with Wordpress 2.5.

Twitter

Some stories were being picked up over Twitter, and Mick Fealty ran a live bloglet on the service.

What about…

If we had out act together we would have been using applications such as Qik to scoop big media by streaming reports and interviews live from election counts. If bloggers can’t be more nimble than the MSM at elections, then that is a straw in the wind for all the other areas of reporting.

My thoughts

I can’t help feeling that Political Blogging is beginning to fit into the shelf that the big media has decided it is going to sit on. The sight of bloggers sitting in a corner of a large TV studio as a commentary service is not one I find to be a good omen.

There’s no one in the Political Blogging pool with enough resources to compete, which is what 18 Doughty Street was able to do to an extent. Where will they (the resources and the people) come from?

In the USA, big political bloggers effectively constitute the first national tabloid press. Here we have one of those, we have the BBC and we have a national online media that is learning to use blogs to add personality to their content. The niche here is that much narrower.

And two speculations

I will return to these over the weekend.

Labour the English Party

Is Labour going to wake up in a few years and find that it is an English Party? Plaid and the SNP are natural competitors for Labour - not the Tories. I can see the same thing happening in the East Midlands as the area grows out of the old mining culture,

The Flight of the Golden Pheasants

Watch out for Golden Parachutes, as the Government try to buy the loyalty of Ministers and MPs who are under threat, to make it more make it comfortable for them when they finally get culled by the electorate.

They already have a questionable record on that score - through:

• Increasing allowances for MPs who are not re-elected.
• Wasting tens of thousands on allowing ex-Ministers to stay in Grace and Favour homes.
• Ministers have also get “redundancy” payouts even when they go in and out of the cabinet like yoyos - even when they leave due to their own misconduct. The defence is always “it is within the rules”, as if rules exist in a separate universe to ethics.

They’ll be lots of shenanigans here. Watch closely.