Politics

Live-Tweeting The European Election Results

Samuel HooperLeave a comment

Live blog European Election 2014 SPS

Real time, Semi-Partisan tweets and analysis of the incoming European election results are accessible here.

There are a lot of moving parts at the moment. As expected, UKIP are performing very well and are still on track to win the vote in the United Kingdom. But interestingly, the Conservative vote is proving quite resilient in many areas – it’s the Liberal Democrats who are haemorrhaging support and staring the possibility of losing all their MEPs in the face.

Nigel Farage appears confident – even jubilant – on television, saying “Who’s to say what UKIP can and cannot achieve in the 2015 general election … Anything’s possible after tonight’s result”.

So far, London is dark – the returning officer is not releasing information from the various London regions individually as they become available, opting to release all of London’s results simultaneously. A much clearer (and more final) view of the new electoral map will be available once we know London’s verdict.

How Do You Solve A Problem Like Nigel Farage?

Samuel Hooper13 Comments

Nigel Farage Pint Elections 2014

 

Let’s play pretend.

Suppose that you are a British voter who happened to express admiration for Nigel Farage back in 2010. Your friends were aghast and asked how you could possibly support such an eccentric right-wing oddball, so you kept quiet for awhile, putting your feelings down to maybe not knowing as much about politics as you should, and feeling a bit chastened by the reaction you received.

Imagine that you then found yourself agreeing with Farage and the UKIP position even more on things like immigration and leaving the European Union when the local elections rolled around in May 2013 and the party made headlines for doing so well. Surely now you could admit to your friends and family that you were becoming a fan of this new kid on the block, especially since one in four voters supported UKIP this time around and they were receiving so much press coverage? But once again, as soon as you mentioned your political sentiments people looked at you as though you must have fallen over and hit your head.

Fast-forward to spring 2014. The things that you think are important issues are still not being addressed by the main political parties,and now the European and local elections are coming up. Only UKIP are offering the policy proposals that seem like common sense to you, and they are the only party whose candidates seem able to express themselves freely and persuasively without sounding like they are reading aloud from (at best) a teleprompter or (more usually) the telephone directory. Surely now people must see the appeal of UKIP? Surely now it must be safe to come out?

At the pub one evening, you admit that you are planning to vote UKIP in the European election, and maybe for the local council too. Outrage! That won’t do at all, it’s quite simply the end of the world. Your horrified friends dive for their smartphones, and before you can blink five brightly-lit screens are shoved in your face, each one blaring “top ten” lists of reasons not to vote UKIP, or trumpeting the misdeeds of a dodgy-looking UKIP councillor on the other side of the country.

Didn’t you know? Nigel Farage wants to rescind women’s suffrage! Godfrey Bloom once chartered a Boeing 767 at his own expense and set up a stall at the Notting Hill carnival, offering dark-skinned people £100 each to hop onboard and fly home to Bongo Bongo Land! How can you think of lending your support to people like that? Are you crazy?

You go home in a sour mood and turn on the computer. You’re sure you had more Facebook friends than that this morning. And why have you received nine invitations to “like” the Liberal Democrats and see the amazing work their MEPs are doing in Brussels, protecting the environment and “standing up to the bankers”? Disgusted – and determined never to vote for Nick Clegg’s party again, no matter how much your overbearing aunt cajoles – you switch on the television. The newsreader is reporting that Nigel Farage was hit by an egg while out campaigning earlier that day. “Wow”, you think. “I know just how he feels”.

Election day rolls around. For the past two weeks, every newspaper article and news segment has seemed to be about UKIP one way or another – and none of them positive. But the UKIP you know from looking at the website and talking to the volunteer on the doorstep doesn’t look anything like the monstrous effigy being held up by the media. You decide to quietly vote UKIP, and just not tell anybody about it. To hell with them anyway, you never said a word when they all decided to jump on the bandwagon and grow pretentious hipster beards.

As the election results start coming in, pandemonium breaks out. David Dimbleby has a meltdown in the BBC studio, the swing-o-meter self-destructs in a shower of sparks, the Labour shadow cabinet form an orderly queue to tell Adam Boulton exactly how Ed Miliband led them to disaster and the Tories are cursing you and your kind for costing them their precious flagship councils in Essex.

What’s more, in the space of two breathless minutes, the all-knowing BBC panel packed with manicured, London-dwelling upper-middle class “experts” has solemnly suggested at least five ludicrous reasons why you voted for UKIP:

You were left behind by the modern information economy. Actually no, you have a decent skilled job; you’re not Alan Sugar but it has good prospects and pays the bills.

Your local community looks nothing like it did in 1960 and it’s scary for you to see the change. Well you were born in the 80s, and you managed to take the internet, iPhones and the falafel restaurant round the corner in your stride without wetting yourself in terror, so that probably isn’t the reason.

You feel persecuted for holding on to your traditional values. Hardly. Two of your friends are gay (the first ones to grow the stupid hipster beards, come to think of it) and although you know that some UKIP councillors have said pretty nasty things about gay people, you’re not homophobic at all, that’s not what attracted you to the party.

You feel like no one listens to you, your vote was just a blind stab at the hated political elite. Well it used to feel like no one listened, but Nigel Farage and his party came and listened. A protest vote would be a spoiled ballot paper or a write-in for the Monster Raving Loony Party. What you did was positive and purposeful, a vote for certain policies you agreed with.

You’re angry, you’re furious, you’re consumed with blind rage. Well yes, but only since the start of this election broadcast!

So many reasons offered by the Westminster commentariat, and none of them the simple truth:

You looked at the Conservative platform and you don’t trust them to deliver on the things that they say they would do – the government is failing to meet its immigration targets again, and the Tories already broke one “cast-iron” promise to hold a referendum on Europe.

You looked at Labour and saw a party that hasn’t even accepted that they did anything wrong when they were in government leading up to the recession, who never mention Europe or immigration at all unless you beat it out of them with a stone, and whose leader can’t even eat a bacon sandwich without getting on the front page of the papers for doing it wrong.

You didn’t bother to look at the Liberal Democrats too closely, because you’re not weird and it isn’t 2010 any more.

But you looked at UKIP and found that their policy prescriptions fit your list of concerns rather handily, and gave them your vote because isn’t that precisely how democracy is supposed to work?

Yes! The truth is that you voted UKIP for the same reason that other people voted for their parties – because you thought through the issues and liked UKIP’s policies. Now why is that so hard for the politicians and people in the media to understand?

Now before you stop reading – yes, there was a point to that tortuous exercise in imagination. Consider:

In the aftermath of the election, all that anyone has been able to talk about is the question of how so many people were conned, duped or tricked into voting UKIP. Earnest, well-intentioned (and less well-intentioned) commentators and newspaper articles have been encouraging us to imagine what it must be like to be a UKIP voter, as though the very thought is so alien that ‘normal’ people actually need a tourist guide into the mind of a Ukipper in order to make sense of the election results. Did you know that they are omnivores and base their waking hours on the rising and setting of the sun, just like us? Fascinating!

But does the media (and they are almost all guilty) ever stop to think what it must be like – purely by virtue of subscribing to some fairly commonly held political views – to be talked about as though you are a symptom of a terrible and shameful national venereal disease, or a wayward prodigal child that needs to be rehabilitated back into the family?

Do the newspaper columnists and TV talking heads ever stop to think just how maddeningly patronising they sound to UKIP voters when they write their anguished, hand-wringing columns on what to do about Britain’s awful UKIP problem?

Most of the time, a conservative can read the Guardian or a liberal the Telegraph and not necessarily feel loved and perfectly understood, but at least see their opinions treated with a very basic level of respect. There were no psychological inquests in the Guardian as to why the voters ignored Gordon Brown’s self-evident brilliance in such large numbers and rudely cast him from Downing Street in 2010, the answer was clearly political.

But with UKIP it is different. It is as though believing in UKIP’s worldview and policies doesn’t deserve acknowledgement, understanding and then persuasion by those who vote differently – it requires correction by those who know better. You’re not thinking properly, UKIP voter. If you were, you would have selected from one of our pre-existing bland political flavours.

Only one article (in the Guardian of all places) shows any degree of contrition at all for the way that UKIP supporters were hounded, bullied and vilified in the press over the past few weeks. Apologies are in very short supply, but there is an abundance of smug condescension packaged as expert political analysis.

A host of British politicians have already been wheeled through the television studios to offer their own variants on the standard post-election-upset mea culpa: we hear their concerns, we need to start speaking their language, we need to show that we are relevant to their lives, we need to stop them from being exploited by the far-right.

You can be sure that all the main parties are plotting their next moves already. The only idea missing from all of their plans? Actually talking to UKIP supporters, and treating them as though they are fellow human beings.

To be a UKIP voter watching or reading the news today must feel as though you are a dangerous but valuable specimen kept in a lab, with a curious Guardian reader in a hazmat suit poking you through the safety glass to see how you respond to political stimuli while someone from CCHQ takes notes and a BuzzFeed staffer snaps pictures and adds mocking captions. I CAN HAZ PINT WITH NIGEL NOW?

This can’t be a very pleasant experience – the resultant emotion is likely to be one of immense irritation at being so misunderstood and publicly belittled. In fact, the only thing likely to make the whole damn experience any better is watching Nigel Farage’s smiling face as he sinks another pint and poses for photographs with his victorious local candidates.

It’s the political and media establishment’s turn to play pretend now:

You are that UKIP voter. After being subjected to this barrage of disbelief turned to mockery turned to outrage turned to hate turned to amazement turned to curiosity turned to pity from the big three political parties and most of the press, where do your political sympathies lie, looking ahead to the 2015 general election?

At Long Last, Will The BBC Take Editorial Bias Seriously?

Samuel Hooper7 Comments

Jasmine Lawrence BBC UKIP bias tweet

It is a sign of the times that things which used to cause outrage are becoming commonplace and shrugged off as unimportant, a fuss about nothing. And so it was that barely anyone spoke up when Jasmine Lawrence, the editor of the BBC News Channel – Britain’s most watched news channel – caused a stir by posting a virulently anti-UKIP screed on Twitter (supposedly in a personal capacity) before quietly deleting it when it began to attract negative attention.

The Guardian summarises the incident:

Lawrence, who has now shut her Twitter account, posted a tweet on Wednesday that said: “#WhyImVotingUkip – to stand up for white, middle class, middle aged men w sexist/racist views, totally under represented in politics today.”

The tweet was posted the day before the local and European elections.

Of course, the story was seized upon by the likes of blogger Guido Fawkes, but outrage and indignation at such a flagrant breach of impartiality should not be the exclusive preserve of those on the right. It does no one any good if the national broadcaster, whose one supposed redeeming feature lies in its non commercial and impartial nature, permits its employees to go rogue without consequences.

And this was far from the only example of BBC journalists publicly showing contempt for political parties outside the “big three” – a BBC Radio 4 producer had this to say:

Rosemary Baker BBC election bias tweet

The BBC’s mail-merged response to Semi-Partisan Sam’s complaint (yes, a complaint was justified) came today via email, and read as follows:

Jasmine Lawrence was tweeting from a personal account. She has been reminded of her responsibility to uphold BBC guidelines. She has deactivated her twitter account and will now be playing no part in the BBC’s election coverage in coming days.

Nevertheless, we acknowledge the strength of your complaint and we can assure you that we’ve registered your comments on our audience log. 

Wow, the audience log. That will definitely stop anything like this from happening again.

What the BBC fail to address in their response is the fact that the remainder of the BBC’s election coverage is not the problem. The problem is the fact that Jasmine Lawrence will remain the editor of the BBC News Channel, presumably resuming full duties as soon as the election coverage is completed on Sunday.

Yes, it is certainly likely that she caused editorial harm and biased coverage in the weeks leading up to the election before her ill-advised tweet saw her stripped of her duties, but how much more damage can she now do in the coming year leading up to the general election?

We all have political preferences, and that’s fine. But the Jasmine Lawrence tweet doesn’t just reveal a tendency to lean one way or the other along the political spectrum. The editor of the BBC News Channel clearly has a deeply ingrained, long held antipathy toward UKIP and the people who support that party or agree with its policies.

Are we really supposed to believe that when she walks into the BBC offices in the morning, Jasmine Lawrence takes off her scornful, UKIP-denigrating hat and puts on her cap of unblemished impartiality, and that the decisions she makes regarding story selection, focusing of time and resources, determining which guests to interview, lines of questioning and other matters will not be influenced by the same sentiments that prompted her to call UKIP supporters white, middle aged sexists and racists?

From the muted BBC response so far, it appears that the corporation remains wholly ignorant or disdainful of the outrage that continued examples of personal bias create among its audience and the British population at large.

Rod Liddle captures and distils this outrage in the Spectator today:

‘I’ve fucking had it with these people. They are so smug; they think they know everything and they know nothing. They want a good kick in the face.’

So said a close friend of mine, more usually a Labour voter, before she went out to vote for Ukip earlier today. I think it was the Jasmine Lawrence thing which tipped her over the edge. Jasmine is, improbably enough, the boss of the BBC’s News Channel. She had ‘tweeted’ that Ukip was a sexist and racist party – yesterday.

Of course, she should be sacked. Right now. The BBC’s News Channel is supposedly impartial – that’s what we pay for, an impartial service. Either that or the BBC should accept that all of its employees possess political views and there is no problem in having them aired. But it will not sign up to that more enlightened position because it knows that 90 per cent of them are as smug, and stupid, and bien pensant as Jasmine.

The latest update from Guido Fawkes reports that a memo has been sent to BBC journalists drawing their attention to pre-existing policies on impartiality. The memo reads, in part:

But the guidance is clear when it comes to personal activity: “As a BBC member of staff – and especially as someone who works in News – there are particular considerations to bear in mind. They can all be summarised as: ‘Don’t do anything stupid’.”

I’d also specifically draw your attention to the following section: “You shouldn’t state your political preferences or say anything that compromises your impartiality. Don’t sound off about things in an openly partisan way. Don’t be seduced by the informality of social media into bringing the BBC into disrepute.”

Don’t do anything stupid – a warning issued rather too late, given the fact that the polls have now closed. But the real damage could lie ahead of Lawrence resumes her duties at the BBC News Channel after the election. If she is reinstated, everything you watch and everything you hear on the BBC’s 24-hour news channel will be filtered through the perspective of someone who thinks that the ~30% of voters sympathetic to UKIP are nothing more than Oswald Mosley blackshirt-style fascists in disguise.

If you believe that actions should have consequences, and that the BBC should have as editor of its news channel someone who is at least able to maintain the illusion of impartiality, you can quickly and easily submit an online complaint here.

Local Elections: Mid-Earthquake Progress Update

Samuel HooperLeave a comment

Nigel Farage UKIP voting

 

Over half of the local election results are in, and so far we see UKIP picking up an impressiv number of council seats (139 and counting), running a strong second in many areas (which is impressive but of course delivers no councils or councillors when it happens) and causing mayhem with the fortunes of the other main parties.

Many of the establishment politicians and journalists, who had clearly vested their hopes in the all-out assault on UKIP in the press, have been caught flat-footed and are struggling to agree a line and respond before being overtaken by events when the European election results are announced on Sunday.

Some politicians, who are capable only of showing condescension toward UKIP voters and sympathisers, tried to portray them as victims with neither intelligence or agency, who are primarily economic ‘losers’ with an axe to grind. Labour’s Douglas Alexander epitomised this view on BBC Radio 4 this morning:

I think there is not just a whole group of people who feel left behind by the economy but locked out of politics. ‘There is a deep anger and alienation there and the votes that we have seen for Ukip overnight are in part a reflection of that reality.

But others showed more nuance and tact:

When the left pipes up about Ukip voters’ worries being reducible to either the “cost of living crisis” or a tangle of concerns around job markets and public services, they get nowhere near the whole story … When you meet a Labour-Ukip switcher who expresses worries about immigration, you can’t simply reduce what they say to falling wages and the lack of social housing.

A plurality – including those who know how the main parties behave – clung to the naive belief that the only thing needed is a change of tone and marketing from the main political parties:

The success of Ukip is a direct and inescapable consequence of the abject failure of the mainstream parties to connect with deeply disillusioned voters. It doesn’t need Dave and Ed to light up a fag and be photographed from now on only with a pint of beer in their hands – perish the thought – it just needs them to start talking a language that vaguely resembles the language the rest of us speak.

Of course, this unlikely formula for success relies on the supposition that the establishment politicians can still remember how to speak the same language as the people they supposedly represent, and that the likes of David Cameron and Ed Miliband might suddenly startspeaking frankly and honestly about Britain’s difficulties and opportunities without having their statements parsed and filtered through party-approved talking points.

Some newspapers have at least had the self-awareness and humility to examine their roles in the anti-UKIP onslaught ahead of the polls, acknowledging that the wholesale, scornful vilification of UKIP supporters not only backfired but was actually wrong:

Over the past week or so … something interesting began to emerge … A collective outbreak of sneering, which started to transcend the party itself and blur into a generalised mockery of anyone minded to support it. You could see it most clearly in the rash of satirical(ish) #WhyImVotingUkip tweets that are piling up even now (e.g. “Because I’m uneducated,uncultured, white and old”) and it’s not pretty: an apparent belief that to vote UKIP is to be an idiot of some description, either bigoted or duped, and worthy of little more than contempt.

… if people are supporting Ukip in such large numbers – even after the media’s massed guns have been rattling at it for weeks – it is probably time to drop all the sneering and think about why.

Rod Liddle at The Spectator came out hard against the “London elite” and their attempt to halt UKIP’s progress at all costs:

But it wasn’t just [the BBC], it was a whole bunch of other stuff too. The splenetic fury which the London elite sprays, mindlessly, upon those who do not agree with its views. I’ve fucking had it with these people too, to tell you the truth.

And a commenter at the Spectator expressed his frustration with those national newspapers who are naturally sympathetic to UKIP’s policies but chose to join in the chorus of misinformation and one-sided anti-UKIP coverage:

Nah, what [did] it for me was to see The Sun, The Mail and The Telegraph sticking the boot into Nigel Farage for expressing concerns those papers usually share.

I mean any other day of the week these newspapers are full of immigration stories, Romanian crime gangs etc, but come election time the papers decided to reinvent themselves as metropolitan luvvies backing the establishment parties and pretending Nigel is a dangerous extremist.

The results are still coming in, so it is natural that the party responses (and attempts to lay the blame) are all over the place. But the local council elections clearly have the main political parties (the “legacy parties” to use Nigel Farage’s terminology) spooked, and a convincing first place for UKIP when the European election results are announced on Sunday will really give them reason to pause and look at themselves.

For those of us watching, the fact that the election results are spread out over three days may be a good thing. By the time the European election results come in, the stock answers and meaningless mea culpas of the politicians and the talking heads will have been used up – and they might be forced to start saying what they really think.

Live-Tweeting The Local Election Results

Samuel HooperLeave a comment

Local Council Election Results Live Tweet SPS

Real time, Semi-Partisan tweets and analysis of the incoming local council election results are accessible here.

The first results are only just coming in, but from those early towns and cities to declare, there is undeniable evidence of a strong UKIP result, with large jumps in their percentage of the vote and some early seat wins on local councils.

The UKIP surge is coming at the expense of all of the other political parties so far, with both Labour and Conservative leads significantly dented in a number of wards.

The political establishment are clearly spooked – Labour’s Chuka Umunna is hard at work on the BBC News Channel continuing the anti-UKIP smears and offering glib and oily platitudes in defence of the political establishment, while Tory MP Douglas Carswell is already appealing to UKIP to agree to a pact with the Conservatives for the 2015 general election.

It is shaping up to be a long, eventful day – and a potentially awkward one for everyone other than Nigel Farage.