Imagine my surprise, then, when I received a leaflet today from the local LibDems, who call themselves “FOCUS” for some reason, saying: “FOCUS goes from strength to strength as another new campaigner joins the team!” Apparently a new leaflet hander-outer called John Reid (no, not that one) is now helping “the new-look FOCUS Team” hand out leaflets. (Click on photo, left, to enlarge.)

You can sort of understand why Davenport and Cale Green’s remaining LibDem councillor, Ann Smith, would decline to mention the fate of her two former colleagues but to dress it up as some kind of triumph, or re-branding exercise, in a direct reversal of the truth, takes some brass balls.

I’m no political expert but would it not have been a better idea to admit in the leaflet that two local councillors and former colleagues had left the party, rather than attempt such a laughable rewriting of history? Councillor Smith might then have built up her message from a position of honesty and credibility. From there, a measure of authority could have been re-established.

But for some reason politicians don’t tend to think this way. Instead, the councillor and her advisers prefer to treat constituents – at least the ones who don’t read the local paper – like idiots in the hope of short-term political gain.

Aside from being a fairly depressing example of the depths to which local politics has sunk, this kind of leaflet is also a good example of  why local newspapers need support. You simply can’t trust councillors – and, although this leaflet isn’t one of them, that includes so-called council “newspapers” – to talk truthfully about the world as any normal person would understand it.

But regardless of all of that, I find it difficult to understand why the BBC’s Question Time has decided to include him on the panel tonight for the fourth time this year. MacKenzie was on the programme on January 14, March 11 and June 3. Add in tonight’s appearance and that will be four programmes out of 41 in 2010 – or as near as damn it 10% of all the Question Times so far this year. (This is in addition to his regular appearances on This Week, Newsnight, the Daily Politics and various other BBC news and politics programmes.)

What dirt does MacKenzie have on the makers of Question Time that causes them to keep inviting him back? It can’t be that the viewing figures shoot up whenever he’s on – in addition to pissing off everyone in Liverpool, everyone in Scotland thinks he’s a prick as well. Perhaps his erudition and debating skills make him indispensable. Yes. That must be it.

Of course there has to – and should – be a spread of political views on Question Time. That’s the point of it, and the fact is that Kelvin MacKenzie represents the views of lots of people who read the Sun newspaper. But four times? In a single year? Isn’t that a bit much?

As the last few weeks have passed, the staggering hypocrisy of Nick Clegg and the rest of the LibDem front bench has become truly apparent. Think back to the election campaign. Clegg was the man who repeatedly described the Tories and Labour as the “old parties”. A campaign poster criticised the Tories’ 20% “VAT bombshell” and voiced opposition to early cuts. Clegg said the Tories have no mandate to make cuts and “take our jobs away” in traditionally working class areas of the UK, like south Yorkshire.

Here’s an extract from an article Clegg wrote in the Independent in March:

The Conservative Party strategy is now clear: personal animus towards its opponents; shameless scaremongering in the financial markets; double standards in its own policies. David Cameron’s spring conference speech carried one message only: vote for me, because I really really hate the other guy. George Osborne’s economically illiterate warnings of meltdown in the money markets carried one message only: vote for us otherwise we’ll get the markets to tear the house down.

These are all now positions that, in a matter of just a few weeks, the LibDems have cheerfully disowned.

The LibDems’ argument seems to be that they can better influence policy as part of a formal coaliton agreement. This is utter crap. The party could just as easily influence policy if the Tories formed a minority government alone and the LibDems negotiated concessions on a bill-by-bill basis. The problem with this approach is that Clegg doesn’t get an overblown job title and a (shared) grace-and-favour country house to doss about in. The man is transparently in it for what he can get out of it.

Spare a thought, though, for local LibDem councillors and other activists who one assumes have maintained – unlike Clegg – at least a modicum of genuine political conviction. In many UK cities, where the Tories are hated, the LibDems are looking at the electoral wilderness. This point was made by former council leader Warren Bradley last week, as well it might be. He is completely screwed.

Politics has had a tough time recently. Nobody in the real world relates to or trusts politicians and apathy is rife. Nick Clegg cannot look anyone in the eye and say that the LibDems have not worsened the situation.

Elsewhere in today’s news, it has been revealed that Charlie Brooker (who clearly regularly mines by blog and Twitter stream for inspiration) intends to marry former Blue Peter presenter Konnie Huq. Brooker’s involvement in this C-list celebrity story brought out the worst in users of the allegedly popular social networking tool. He maintains massive cuddleability among that certain brand of free-thinking, straight-talking, pathetic, greying liberal comedy wannabes who populate Twitter, meaning Huq’s name quickly started to trend. But might I offer the following tip to Brooker fans: If you want him to like you, and you obviously do, it’s probably best not to do what I saw someone do earlier, which is to call his wife-to-be a whore. Especially if you mention @charltonbrooker in the tweet.

And James Corden. Something to do with James Corden. You’ll have to Google it.

Salford (the Eccles bit was recently bolted on to the constituency) is Labour through and through but during the time I’ve spent there during the last few weeks, it’s become obvious that there is little real backing for the party or its candidate. On polling day, I witnessed a Labour canvasser bawling in favour of the pint-sized MP through a megaphone and an old lady on the pavement mutter, quick as a flash, “I’d rather vote for Adolf ‘Itler”. Nonetheless, many people were happy to admit that they will vote for Blears anyway because they don’t want to open the door to anyone else.

On the night, Blears’ share of the vote fell by 15%, off a 55% turnout. Out of a constituency of around 75,000, just 16,655 people actually voted for the victorious MP, who singled out the Conservative candidate, Matthew Sephton, in her thank you speech.

Despite Blears’ declining share of the vote, the traditional left doesn’t seem to be winning the argument in Salford. David Henry, whose Hazel Must Go ticket was backed by the Trade Union and Socialist Coalition, did manage a respectable 730 votes. But that was less than a third of the total achieved by the BNP candidate, Nick Griffin’s PA Tina Wingfield, who racked up 2,632 votes. Blears has promised to listen to her constituents as never before and her most pressing task now is surely to win back support from those whose disillusionment with her brand of politics and house-flipping antics has resulted in a rise in support for the far right. Unless the issue of immigration is properly discussed and debated by the main parties, I really fear for places like Salford, where anti-immigrant sentiment on the doorstep is regularly fairly shocking.

As for what happens now, it would be nice to see some form of proportional representation come out of the situation. In Salford, the votes of 60% of those who voted counted for nothing, which simply can’t be right. I have a feeling, though, that despite honourable intentions, Nick Clegg and the massed ranks of the Liberal Democrats will be no match whatsoever for the entrenched political elites who want to preserve the power base afforded by first past the post.

I finally escaped Buile Hill Visual Arts College, where the count was held, at 5.43am. Towards the end, under the fluorescent lights, the atmosphere got very unusual indeed. Although the only chemical about the place was adrenaline, there was this really odd feeling of a bizarre all-nighter populated by wide-eyed, rosette-wearing geeks.

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 a grab from Tweetie:

It was all very strange, since Amnesty rarely, if ever, uses its Twitter stream for anything outside the sphere of human rights. The use of the word “love” and the sarcastic tone were also most unlike them.

A few minutes later, this tweet appeared, disclaiming responsibility:

I can only apologise massively for our last tweet – trying to work out how it happened. Obviously, not Amnesty’s view.

Subsequently, the charity said it had changed its Twitter password. In an @reply, it confirmed the tweet had been sent by a staff member, but blamed a “very obscure Tweetdeck bug” for accidently sending the message from the AmnestyUK account instead of the individual’s own account, adding: “We’re a bit baffled.”

It’s not especially likely that David is going to win. Despite the problems Hazel Blears has faced, Salford is an extremely strong Labour heartland and the latest odds from Ladbrokes rate a Labour win in Salford at 1/12. Still, I’m hoping that there will still be some drama in this David versus Goliath battle. Either that or we will end up with quite a pessimistic film in which, despite the ingredients for change being very much present, everything eventually ends up being the same.

From what I’ve seen so far, apathy and disenfranchisement from the political process seem to be a major problem for all the candidates. Among the few issues voters really want to talk about is immigration. Where disillusionment with Labour is to be found on the doorstep, people admit that they are considering voting for the BNP, whose candidate, Tina Wingfield, is Nick Griffin’s PA.

We’re going to be filming for the whole of the campaign in an observational style. It should be an interesting process.

If any of these people come knocking at your door in the next few weeks, you might want to cut this out and wave it at them accusingly.

The information is taken from Hansard here.

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 #CashGordon hashtag began to trend highly, regardless of the actual merits of the campaign or content of the CashGordon site (in this case, Charlie Whelan and the Unite union’s supposed hold over Gordon Brown and Labour policy). This much was admitted by Tory blogger Samuel Coates, who said on Twitter earlier:

Sitting back and marvelling at #CashGordon – we had an open hashtag policy, and have not changed that today, for a reason!

Other examples of self-satisfied gloating on Twitter earlier today came from the Tories’ in-house “online communities editor” Craig Elder, who praised Labour and lefty-types for drawing attention to the CashGordon site:

@psbook Such an own goal on your part, repeatedly drawing attention to our campaign. Please continue.

What was actually happening here was not any discussion of Whelan or Unite. Instead, there was lots of criticism for CashGordon. The Guardian had noticed that the site used a template that had been developed in the US as a campaign tool against US healthcare reform. The phrase also started to trend highly because people quickly realised that since the Twitter stream on the CashGordon website was unmoderated, you could write embarrassing things about the Tories (or indeed childish swearwords, or even adverts) and get them on to the CashGordon site in real time, provided they were tagged #CashGordon (see image, top left).

Then someone realised that the site could be exploited by script commands. Pretty soon, CashGordon was redirecting to a site saying “David Cameron is a c**t” in 48-point type, a Rick Astley video on YouTube and some OAP porn (link is safe for work). The site was subsequently taken down and remains offline. All in all, then, this was fairly obviously a total embarrassment, a mega PR fail and a terrible idea very poorly executed.

Yet, after a couple of hours, Elder and Coates reappeared on Twitter, still maintaining that all was well. After I sarcastically observed that CashGordon was “a social media triumph”, Elder replied to me like this:

@davidquinn Can’t disagree with that – it’s still trending in the UK…

How stupid do you have to be to think that just because a word or phrase trends on Twitter, that automatically makes it a good campaign? It obviously doesn’t, and to think otherwise is simply confusing the medium with the message.

I realise that as an employee of the Conservative party, Elder’s job is to talk up its “successes” against all rational logic but, really, does he actually believe that this idea was executed in a way that was positive for the Tories? His argument, and that of some other social media practitioners, seems to be that if you get something trending, you’ve automatically “won”. But in this case people aren’t talking about Unite, the BA strike or Charlie Whelan (the point of the Tory campaign). Instead, they’re talking about how a flagship Tory website has been forced offline in embarrassing circumstances – and having a bloody good laugh about it. How is this a win?

Using the Tory rationale, Nestlé had a good day on Friday, when the company’s name began to trend on Twitter following claims by Greenpeace about the slaying of orang-utans during Nestlé’s harvesting of palm oil, which was compounded by Nestlé’s disastrous intervention on Facebook, in which it told people to stop using its logo. In reality, of course, the brand has taken a dive and the thing is already a case study in how not to “do” social media.

Looking back, if it’s remembered at all, I very much doubt CashGordon will be seen as a brilliant use of Twitter as a political campaigning medium. Instead, it will be seen as a byword for total technical incompetence and a fundamental misunderstanding of the point of social media.

Footnote: In case you’re wondering, and since there’s an election brewing, this blog is not pro-Labour, nor is it pro- any other political party.

It was my first time at a protest of this sort and it started quite amicably before getting a little bit unpredictable later on. There was some heavy-handedness on the police side. Its strategy of entering the square, arresting UAF leaders and moving a line of officers forward in an attempt to pen anti-fascist protesters into a small area seemed over the top. It struck me that the police were happy for the UAF to remain in Victoria Square but as soon as they started to march, they felt the need to crack down.

I also found it odd that the police had split the town centre into two, with a kind of Berlin Wall type arrangement running down across Victoria Square. Predictably, neither side was ever going to pay much attention to this and, at about 11am, the UAF lot marched off towards Knowsley Street, in the opposite direction from the blockade. I’m not entirely sure what happened after that but the police formed a line, there was a lot of pushing and shoving, and the UAF group got split in two, with a second group forming on Old Hall Street.

Around the same time, a number of coaches arrived and the group in the square swelled. The police moved officers into the square, which was seen by the UAF lot as an aggressive encroachment into an area of peaceful protest (I’m inclined to agree with them). The police then arrested a number of UAF leaders, which of course didn’t go down very well at all. The riot uniforms and dogs soon appeared.

I saw quite a lot of people getting dragged off by police, including a number of bespectacled women who, to be perfectly honest, didn’t look even slightly threatening. An old guy of about 80, clearly a pacifist who was holding a sign imploring British troops to leave Afghanistan, was bundled to the ground by an advancing plod (image, right).

We saw some smoke bombs and then, ludicrously, found ourselves on the other side of the police line at the northern side of the square, looking back at the anti-fascist protesters. It struck me at this point that there was a bit of pointless posturing going on. One minute I was on the protesters’ side of the line, the next minute I was on the other. I couldn’t work out the point of this police front line, which was made up of riot police and dogs, since there was nothing but other UAF and media people on the other side of it. Around this time I saw a young blonde police woman in full riot gear laughing her head off. Perhaps she found it strange, too.

After hanging around a bit longer we decided to leave. The subject of the film (I’d best not name him just now) had left after his mate got arrested and a couple of his friends sustained injuries. Police claim there were 2,000 EDL supporters and 1,500 anti-fascists in Bolton today. I would estimate that there were more anti-fascists (I’m not an expert on protests, as I say, but I’ve been to music festivals and football matches, and I know what a thousand people looks like). The only EDL group I saw numbered less than half a dozen numbskulls waving St George flags – although it could be that the bulk of the group had assembled elsewhere.

I’ve previously been a bit sceptical about UAF protests and it’s tempting to argue that if you just ignore the EDL they will eventually go away. On the other hand, why should racists be allowed to parade through the streets unchallenged? Either way, town centre businesses will have taken a big hit today. There isn’t a shop open and, away from the protest, it felt like a ghost town.