Election Classic

MOST observers seem to agree that this general election is more exciting than most: A combination of global recession, the Government’s massive debts, the faltering starts by Labour Prime Minister Gordon Brown and Tory leader David Cameron, and the surprisingly good impression by Liberal/Democrat leader Nick Clegg have all combined to give the hustings impetus.
The national excitement is reflected here in Westmorland and Lonsdale which has the added dimension of it being a tight marginal won, just, by the Lib/Dem Tim Farron from the Conservatives back in 2005.
Inevitably the BBC North West Tonight team decided to feature the constituency this week and decided they needed an “independent observer”. Less inevitably, they chose me.
They had wanted to explore the Nick Clegg factor, only to find that what people in the constituency wanted to talk about was the Tim Farron factor.
I managed to say that in all elections the best the local constituency party hopes for is that the national leaders and central offices don’t muck up their chances. In this case Nick Clegg has done the reverse for Mr Farron.
He has made an impression as a likeable, energetic and very effective local MP. The Tories, however, have found an equally likeable, energetic and effective candidate in Gareth McKeever.
The UKIP and Labour candidates, by contrast, stand less than no chance. Embarrassingly I forgot their names on camera (John Mander and Jonathan Todd, respectively). But I suppose my loss of memory reflected the fact that this really is a two-horse race.
All four runners were at a lunch question time organised by the Cumbria Chamber of Commerce at The Riverside Hotel in Kendal today.
Hotel owner Jonathan Denby made the most insightful contribution, pointing out to UKIP’s Mr Mander that in 2005 his party polled more votes than the margin of Mr Farron’s win. So, in effect, they had handed the seat to the Liberal Democrats.
In view of the Lib/Dems pro-Europe stance, wouldn’t the best tactic be for him to withdraw and support Mr McKeever? Mr Mander, who made a poor impression generally, was completely flummoxed by this.
The other outsider, Mr Todd, and the two main men performed better, although Mr McKeever made the mistake of attacking the spending of public money on the Kirkgate entrance to Kendal, especially as the main protagonist, formidable businesswoman Mandy Dixon, was in the audience.
The debate lurched between Europe, the Economy (especially the impact of a 1% increase in National Insurance contributions), Immigration, Crime, Education and Pensions, to the more prosaic New Road free car park in Kendal.
But the debate as always in Westmorland & Lonsdale boils down to whether a hung Parliament, facilitated by a victory for Mr Farron, would make decisive Government impossible, or whether it was better for a rural constituency to vote for Mr McKeever to help ensure a Conservative government committed to change.
A photo-finish is ensured.

Story finally takes off

THE Media was dreadfully slow to wake up to the implications and opportunities in the story about the volcanic ash grounding all flights in or out of the UK.
The BBC in particular kept telling the same story illustrated by the same graphics: Volcano erupts, plume of ash might get in engines, flights grounded, airports quiet. For several days, Heathrow and Manchester airports hosted reporters giving an exercise in déjà vu.
The first real human interest angle I heard was actually on good old Radio Cumbria which featured a lady from Barrow who had her trip to Penang and on to her daughter in Australia cancelled. What was really interesting was the knock on impact on the lives of all the people she knew.
If there were 150,000 Britons trapped abroad, there would be that many fascinating stories to tell on how people were coping.
By later on Saturday it was the plight of celebrities that was obsessing the national media.
First there was former Monty Python and Fawlty Towers star John Cleese who took a £3,000 taxi ride from Oslo in Norway to the Belgian capital Brussels after becoming stranded.
The 943-mile journey is due to take him more than 15 hours. He is being driven by a total of three taxi drivers who are taking turns at the wheel.
But Match of the Day presenter Gary Lineker wasn't far behind. He made sure he was available for Saturday night's programme by making a marathon trip across Europe.
Lineker was holidaying in Tenerife when the flight ban took effect. So he booked a flight to Madrid, hired a car at the airport and drove through the night to Paris where he caught the Eurostar to London.
Clare Balding drove back from Switzerland to present the fourth-round rugby league Challenge Cup tie between Hull and Leeds. And Jonathan Pierce drove from northern France to commentate on football this afternoon.
Singer Whitney Houston, who was due to perform in Dublin as part of her Nothing But Love world tour, was forced to take to the Irish Sea on a less-than-glamorous car ferry.
The 46-year-old star opted for the boat after the flight ban threatened to cause another cancellation on her tour, which has already suffered several cancelled dates due to her respiratory infection earlier this month.
By the time I had bought my Sunday papers, they were full of journeys of daring-so by staff trapped abroad (which says something about the lifestyle of these national media types).
One Independent on Sunday writer wrote glowingly about his adventure getting from near Rome back home, the travel editor of course was stranded in the Algarve, and Janet Street-Porter, God Bless Her, filed her copy from Italy, saying: You’re Stranded – Get Over It. She would say that, wouldn’t she.
But if you want real Dunkirk spirit, TV presenter Dan Snow had been planning on ferrying people back to Dover throughout Sunday. Each round trip was expected to take two hours. He filled three rigid inflatable boats with 25 people but was told by officials in Calais that he would not be able to return. A spokesperson for the group said they did not know the reason why.
It’s a good job there were no health and safety inspectors around in 1940.

Gene Hunt image is Labour's own goal

POSTERS are a much maligned medium. I am surprised more use is not made of their ability to get across messages.
If you need convincing on the potential power of the images on bill-boards plastered on hoardings then remember the Labour isn’t working slogan which helped Margaret Thatcher lead the Conservatives back to electoral victory back in 1979.
But Labour may well have shot themselves in the foot by trying to repeat that success, ironically using the same advertising agency responsible for that Tory coup.
According to web-sites today, Labour will portray David Cameron as politically-incorrect TV detective Gene Hunt in a poster campaign designed to revive memories of 1980s social unrest and youth unemployment.
The poster - the winner of a public competition - shows the Tory leader sat on the bonnet of an Audi Quattro like that driven by Hunt in the Life on Mars and Ashes To Ashes series.
And it appeals to voters: "Don't let him take Britain back to the 1980s."
Apparently cash-strapped Labour launched a poster competition in a bid to save money on design by tapping into public creativity after a slew of parodies of Tory ads swept the internet.
The Gene Hunt theme was the brainchild of 24-year-old activist Jacob Quagliozzi and was worked up by Labour's ad agency Saatchi and Saatchi. Cabinet minister brothers David and Ed Miliband are due to officially launch the election poster.
Foreign Secretary David said he and his brother first got into politics in the 1980s and that the poster was a "powerful reminder of the damage which the Tories did to Britain in the 80s and the threat which they pose to the country should they win the election".
The pair is expected to make several campaigning appearances together with the aim of securing the support of under-25s for a fourth Labour term.
But my own reaction that Labour may have seriously misunderstood the mood of the nation was borne out by comments on the story.
“This could be a campaign that could backfire very badly for Labour. Labour could actually manage to do what the Tories can't and make Cameron seem cool, this campaign couldn't have been timed better”...”The 1980s... I wish, how kind and gentle they now seem, please, please take us back!”... “Labour has totally missed the point of Gene Hunt? Gene Hunt is cool, women want to sleep with him and straight British males want to be him, own goal”...“Labour so genuinely out of touch that they don’t realise Gene Hunt is pretty much exactly what people want? Someone who kicks the bejeezus out of criminals and doesn’t respect 'political correctness' is something people would vote for” ...these are typical of reaction.
It depends on which image of the 80s you share: the horrors of the Falklands war, the 4 million unemployed, and the destruction of mining communities; or the glorious victory over the Argentinians, the property boom and putting the unions in their place.
Like Gene Hunt, the 80s polarised public opinion. I suppose that is what elections do, too.

Icy blast for old media

THIRTY years ago some bright spark had a great idea for a freebie give-away to promote sales of an aerosol de-icer spray for motor car windscreens.
It was a neat little scraper with three surfaces, one sponge for water, one soft edge for mist and one hard edge for ice.
It worked a treat, so well, in fact that I still have the scraper and never had to buy any spray again, which was good news for the environment, good news for my pocket, but terrible news for the de-icer manufacturer.
I often laughed at the thought of such a self-destructive promotion. Who would be stupid enough to give something away free that worked so well that no-one wanted to buy the main product?
And who would have guessed that my own beloved media industry would make exactly the same mistake?
For de-icer spray, think newspapers. For scraper, think internet.
For ten years or so newspapers have been giving away content for free on the internet, and wandering why their newspaper sales figures have been plummeting.
Even worse, the old media companies have been incapable of raising any revenues from the Internet, despite what they may say.
The new kids on the block, notably Google, have none of the expense of producing newspapers or bulletins, nor any editorial staff who have to find stories.
Instead they trawl the Internet with their spiders and pinch all the material, whether it be advertising or editorial content, from the sites of the traditional media.
Then to top it all, they coin in cash from their own advertising revenue streams. Google alone now garners more cash from advertising than the whole of ITV.
It would be as amusing as the de-icer gaffe, if it had not been for the thousands of staff in newspaper, radio and television offices up and down the country who have lost their jobs as a result, including yours truly.
Not that it has been an easy conundrum for the traditional media industry to solve. How could they have protected themselves from the new wave of technology?
Well, they could have ignored the world-wide web, which would have robbed the search engines of their content and meant that the local media at least could have remained a unique source of news and advertisements.
But that smacks of head-in-the-sand mentality. And it wouldn’t have stopped house, jobs and motors advertisements stampeding to the new platforms.
Alternatively the old media could have invested in ensuring their own web developments stayed ahead of the competition and then charged customers for their internet offering.
This is what Rupert Murdoch is beginning to do. And the regional press is also giving it a try.
Two North West dailies are spearheading the latest experiment in paid-for online content by launching new subscription-only e-editions of their titles.
The Bolton News and Lancashire Telegraph, both owned by Newsquest, are currently advertising electronic versions of the paper costing 10p a copy - compared to the 40p cover price for the print versions.
The papers are marketing the move as a chance for readers to get the news earlier and save money at the same time.
The e-editions will use the 'page-turning' software run by PageSuite which is becoming increasingly popular with many local press companies now using it.
Reaction to the news, on Hold The Front Page, was typical: “Interesting marketing strategy - don't buy our product which costs more - buy this one which comes out first and is cheaper” was one comment. “Surely it’s only going to further affect sales of the printed product?” said another.
But another thought it was the only way to go. “For once I have to agree with Murdoch that ALL newspapers should have paid-for online versions. People are decreasing buying newspapers because you can get the same news more quickly and for free online. Online advertising hasn't proved to be the cash cow it was once thought. It may sound harsh on readers but to stop the endless cuts and decrease in quality of journalism we all need to follow the above examples.”
So even with the benefit of hindsight, professionals in the industry do not agree as to what the answer is.
My suspicion is that the old-style media companies are responding far too late to the threat, and still haven’t worked out how to capitalise on the opportunity.
The intriguing question is: When the traditional media and its journalists have all disappeared, from where will the web-sites get their content?

First ship jobs dominate list

THE Sunday Times this weekend had a fascinating extra supplement, as if it needed any more.
Its annual 100 Best Small Companies To Work For was inspiring.
Here were organisations which, according to surveys of their own staffs, engaged in meaningful consultation with workers, promoted their well-being, demonstrated a willingness to give back to the communities they served, and cared about personal development.
A lot were run by self-confessed weird and eccentric entrepreneurs; some didn’t even judge their performance by how much money they made.
But their satisfaction ratings for employees went up to a staggering 96%.
So what could possibly be wrong with all that? Well, nothing as it happens.
Except there was something else revealed by the list of 100 best performers out of the 571 which put themselves up for scrutiny.
That something probably says more about the state of the British economy, and its prospects for the future, than any surveys or dry Government statistics.
Practically none of the companies made anything.
The winner offered what it called IT Solutions. Next came a charity. Then there was a marketing consultancy.
And so on: Professional services, public relations, property management, software development, human resources and management consultancy were the names of the games featuring in the top twenty.
A contractor sneaked in at 21 and a retirement home construction company at 25, but largely the roll-call read like a description of all the jobs described by Douglas Adams in Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy as the sort of professions pursued by occupants of the first ship sent into space from a doomed planet before its destruction by an intergalactic goat.
The idea was, of course, that no such goat existed and it was a ruse to get rid of non-productive people. They ended up colonising Earth.
Well, I wouldn’t advocate going quite that far. But it must be of huge concern that so few primary industries (miners or growers), secondary (manufacturers) or even tertiary (retailers) made the grade.
That means either such firms don’t exist, or that they are run by bad employers who care not a jot for the people who work for them.
To extend the system used in my children’s geography classes, the companies who dominated the Sunday Times list could be described as quaternary (marketing, PR and Training) or even quintenary, if there is such a word, for consultants.
As a consultant, I don’t mind admitting that this is scary, and explains why this country’s economy is in such a rut and is taking so long to recover from recession.

Rat gnaws quiche tale

REGULAR readers of this blog (that’s both of you) will know that I have previously highlighted the strange news values of the national press and how they feed off each other. See the Taffy Thomas tale in the archive.
Well a similar nonsense has been exposed by the story about a young woman being asked for ID to buy quiche in her local branch of Tesco.
The Leamington Observer story about 24-year-old Christine Cuddihy being forced to show her driving licence to staff languished almost unnoticed on its website for almost a week.
However after an agency repackaged the story after tracking down the woman involved, it quickly became national headline news.
The Daily Mail made it top story on its website on Tuesday with most of the rest of the national media swiftly folllowing suit.
Six days later it had become a top talking-point in BBC radio phone-ins while the Mail's online story had attracted more than 800 reader comments.
The Observer's deputy editor Kevin Unitt, who wrote the original story, told Hold The Front Page: “I knew it was a good story, and hoped it would be picked up by the national press, but none seemed particularly interested at first.
“The Sun ran just three lines on it on page 25 last week and the Daily Mail rejected it altogether because The Sun had already covered it, a bizarre decision given they would lead their own website with the story just a few days later.
“How our story – which had been printed for almost a week and for all that time had been visible to all on our website leamingtonobserver.co.uk – finally grew legs nationally was the introduction of a press agency, who tracked down the woman involved, slightly re-packaged the story, and sold it on to their national newspaper contacts.
“On Tuesday, almost a week after we'd ran the piece, the Daily Mail finally screamed it from their website, making it the top story as it generated more than 600 comments from readers across the world in just 12 hours.
Unfortunately a lot of the comments on the HTFP story slag off agencies for picking up and exploiting local journalists’ stories.
“Agencies leech on to the local press, trawl through their websites and do little work and get great rewards,” was typical.
It was ever thus. Besides just try selling stories to the Nationals and you will see what a time-consuming, frustrating and fairly unrewarding exercise it is.
But I was more interested in why this was a story in the first place. One self-confessed cynical hack told HTFP: “google the name of the woman involved and you find she is on Saatchi's graduate scheme. One of the criteria to win a place on Saatchi is to get extensive media coverage. I smell a rat."
Another said: “Is the story true? The comment from Tesco was a bit non-committal. Did they confirm that it actually happened?”
And there lies the rub. If Tesco, also currently famous for its dress policy (no pyjamas and no bare feet), did ask for id before selling a quiche, then it is a story.
If they didn’t, it isn’t.

Verdict on inquests

AFICIANADOS of Agatha Christie or similar period detective novels will be accustomed to the all-powerful figure of the coroner.
The man, and yes it always was a man in those days, with joint qualifications in medicine and law held his investigations with the help of supplicant police officers and anyone else he called upon, within days of the suspicious death.
And if he thought he got to the bottom of nefarious deeds he would order the arrest of the person deemed responsible for the heinous crime.
That is not the case now. Coroners come right at the end of the procedural pecking order. The police have to investigate, the facts have to examined by the Crown Prosecution Service, the case has to be heard by magistrates and, more likely than not, the Crown Court, all before the coroner is allowed to have his say.
Take the case of Gordon Park, the convicted killer of his wife Carol thirty years ago, who then hid the body in a bag in Coniston Water. He was found dead in his prison cell at Garth prison, Leyland, last week.
He always denied the murder and campaigners maintained that his death, widely reported as suicide, was proof that he was so tormented by frustration at not being able to prove his innocence that he took his own life. Others said it was proof of his guilt.
The media was full of speculation as to which version was more likely. Yet the matter could have been resolved almost instantly by a confident coroner immune from litigation from aggrieved parties.
If it was suicide, and that is really for the coroner’s inquest to decide, then Park would more than likely have left a note. That note could clear up the mystery once and for all.
But because it was a prison death, the prison and probation ombudsman will have to complete inquiries and report before the inquest is held. So the warring branches of Park’s families are unlikely to get the peace they deserve for a year or more.
In the days when coroners ruled the roost, he wouldn’t have waited for the ombudsman. Even if he did, then he could quite easily have revealed whether a note was left and what it said at the inquest opening, held within days of the death.
The Government could save itself millions of pounds in public inquiries and statutory investigations if it just handed powers back to the coroners.
Nearly every disaster and high profile death is followed by calls for inquiries. Independent and thorough inquests would achieve the same result for a fraction of the cost.
There would be a price to pay in insisting that coroners reaffirmed their priority of getting to the whole truth and stopped giving verdicts designed to protect families from emotional upset and financial penalties imposed by life insurance policies. But that would be a small price and one well worth paying to restore coroners to the status and influence they once held.