Words Dept.: category

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 of [...]

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 but here’s [...]

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 the [...]

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 it [...]

The BBC appears to have spent much of today debunking its own story about the National Bullying Helpline allegedly taking calls from members of Downing Street staff. I listened in amusement at lunchtime as a reporter on Five Live quoted several issues about this charity that were raised last night on Adam Bienkov’s Tory Troll [...]

The Conservative Party conference is taking place in Manchester this week. I know this because of the twin-set and tweed lot I spotted hanging around Piccadilly this morning (alongside a confused looking David Dimbleby).
That the Tories have chosen Manchester as the host city for their last conference before a General Election says something about their [...]