Words Dept.: category

I live in the Cale Green area of Stockport. Until recently we had three Liberal Democrat councillors. Then in February, two of them – Roy Driver and David White – left the LibDems to stand under the banner of “Independent Left”. These are the facts. Imagine my surprise, then, when I received a leaflet today from [...]

I don’t really like Kelvin MacKenzie. He’s a loudmouthed, right-wing, rabble-rousing reactionary. He’s also someone who seems unwilling to recognise the universally accepted truth about the cause of the Hillsborough disaster which, as a Liverpool fan – and even simply as a football fan – I find both bizarre and abhorent. But regardless of all [...]

Two months after the election, the utter awfulness of the Liberal Democrats has hit me in the last few days with some degree of clarity. Of course the Tories are a bunch of shits – everyone knows that already. But the LibDems are even worse. As the last few weeks have passed, the staggering hypocrisy [...]

I always thought the Labour Party was about achieving things on merit, rather than as a result of an accident of birth. That’s why the dismal tokenism that resulted in Diane Abbott scraping together enough nominations to get on to the ballot paper for the party’s leadership makes the Labour Party look ridiculous. The idea [...]

My memory of the General Election this year is going to be dominated by Salford. As previously mentioned, I’ve been making a documentary about the local campaign in Salford and Eccles, focusing mainly on the anti-Hazel Blears candidate. As a result, I managed to get into the count on Thursday night/Friday morning and witnessed, at [...]

As a follower (and member) of Amnesty, I was perturbed to read this tweet from their official Twitter account this afternoon: Gordon is right. She is a bigoted woman. Here is a tip Love, where have all the Eastern Europeans come from? How about Eastern Europe! The tweet has since been deleted from the web [...]

I’m currently working on a film about the general election campaign in Salford. It struck me as a good idea for a documentary after Salford MP Hazel Blears got embroiled in the expenses scandal last year. The film isn’t really about that, though. It’s about how ordinary people respond to politicians and the candidates themselves, [...]

This table shows how MPs in Greater Manchester voted over the Digital Economy Bill. The only Manchester MP who voted against was Liberal Democrat John Leech, MP for Manchester Withington. Of the 28 MPs across the city region, more than half (17) didn’t actually bother to vote. Of those who voted, all the local Labour [...]

Today’s CashGordon fiasco has got me thinking about the point of a social media campaign and reinforces the point that simply getting your brand or campaign mentioned on Twitter is not an end in itself. For Tories, the CashGordon strategy was based around creating something that would inflame people on Twitter, and then watching as [...]

I’ve just got back from Bolton, where Unite Against Fascism have organised a counter-protest to a demonstration by the English Defence League in the town centre. I’m making a film about someone on the UAF side, so I was there as an observer. It was my first time at a protest of this sort and [...]