Quote of the day comes from Alex Massie of the Speccie in his post entitled, “Gordon Brown is a Rescue Donkey“.
Bottom line: There are a lot of people in this country who give money to donkey sanctuaries and pet rescue homes and while this may not be the demographic Labour would choose to target, it’s one the Tories might be alienating.
Oh dear.
Well, blogging’s dead. Didn’t you know? The real action is taking place on Twitter. So you’ve signed up to Twitter and you want to make the biggest impression possible. What do you do?
That’s right, it’s time for another slightly evil guide to Tweeting.
Some subjects ‘trend’ – that means lots of people are talking about one particular subject. It’s important that you get involved with them all as enthusiastically as possible, because there’s nothing people love more than seeing 100 tweets about something they don’t understand. It makes their day interesting!
“Fingle fingle whopper is AWESOME TREND! loloolol #finglewhopper”
We’ve all heard the joke that people join Twitter so that they’ve got an audience for when they fit a ceramic bus with some new brown cables. It’s not a joke. This is what people want. Every single thought that passes through your head must be tweeted, and every single thing you do must go on the record.
Your admiring followers will worship you for it.
“I really should get round to counting the number of paces between my desk and the coffee machine.”
Don’t be fooled – blogging is for the lazy. You can write a blog post like this and set the timer to publish it at a specific time, say, 3pm, and then forget about it. Twitter, on the other hand, requires constant nurturing and feeding. If you’re already ‘tweeting everything’ then this shouldn’t be a problem, but sometimes there’s gaps – so tweet about tweeting if you have to.
“RT: Damn! Forgot to indicate on that bend! lollololl!!”
Another strategy for generating sufficient content for your Twitter feed is to reply to absolutely everyone who tweets at you – but be sure to add a full stop before the ‘@sucker’ bit so that everyone who follows you can see what you’re saying. Be sure to retweet everything anyone says to you, too. Wouldn’t want anyone to miss out a single moment of your life, would you? It sometimes helps if you have a Bot to do this for you. I’m happy to program one for you, for a measly £10k, but think – what’s money compared with being the most awesome Twitterer in the world?
“RT @angry_man: OH FFS YOU MORON STFU!!! <— LULZZZ!!
DDD”
If you’re replying to everything you’ve already got this covered, but it’s an important enough principle that it needs restating – whatever happens, make sure you get the last word. Superficially easy, simply reply to everything, including the replies. This makes you The Boss Of Twitter if you do it consistently.
“. @angelboobs14532 Really? Britney Spears porn? Yay! Thank you!”
Keep things fresh and funky! By changing your Avatar and name every few hours, your followers (you do still have some followers, right?) will think, Hey! Who’s that interesting person? And they’ll be forced to check it out and realise it’s their old friend, YOU! Their hearts will be filled with a warm glow, because, for a minute there, they thought they’d lost you.
“I have a new name ROFL! I am now @MAXIMOR_INDESTRUCTABLE lololol!!”
The Twitterverse offers lots of quizzes that you can take so long as you give them permission to send Tweets from your account. This gives you an invaluable opportunity to give your followers this crucial and informative knowledge – how Gay are you? How clever are you? What Scooby Doo character are you? People need to know this information, and they need to know where they can find out these important facts about themselves.
This is your public service. Your duty. Your destiny.
“lol I am 34% Furry! (Take the How Furry are you test at http://los.er/101)”
Your followers aren’t interested in the adventures of a normal person. You must become a God, walking amongst their people – benign and magnificent. You are the perfect weight, height, tremendously good looking, people fall at your feet to admire you. When you’re telling your followers you’re doing a number two, this is what you should write:
“lol! Another gold plated poo! And HUGE too! Biggest ever!”
Nothing your followers love more than finding themselves redirected to a Youtube video of Rick Astley singing “Never Gonna Give you Up”.
“Research shows that you can drink yourself sober after all: http://bit.ly/rickr (NOT Rick-roll this time!)”
“Sorry, here’s the real link. http://bit.ly/rickr. Real thing this time, definitely not Rick-roll.”
“Ha ha! Got you again! Okay, well, here’s the real link, fo real: http://bit.ly/rickr.”
So you now have all the knowledge you need to create a truly winning and successful Twitter feed. But where do you get your audience from? Where do you get your followers? It’s simple! Follow everyone who follows Iain Dale. Most will automatically follow you back, and these are all profoundly important and influential people who’ll spread the word about this hottest new talent! Don’t forget to Retweet what they say about you!
“Anyone else been added by @MAXIMOR_INDESTRUCTABLE? Stupid Spammer alert! <– LOLOLOL!!!!”
Yes, Twitter. It’s amazing. Now, who wants to follow me?
Tory Bear pointed his twitter followers in the direction of this propaganda piece in the New Statesman that claims, without verification or corroboration that private polling inside Number 10 shows Labour will overtake the Conservatives in the polls by the end of the year. Cue much hilarity and mocking.
“Neil Kinnock wrote the first version of Windows and sold it to Microsoft to raise the money for their 1992 General Election campaign!”
But, let’s put the ‘outrageous whoppers’ meme aside. The New Statesman piece is more appropriate material for Valentines day than a hung-over Monday. It features a photograph of Gordon showing a bit of teeth, and features the decidedly on-message, head-office approved language of fighting. The author seems practically giddy with excitement. Labour! 4th Term! Win! Yes!
It all adds up: The fight-back has begun! Of course, cynics might point out that this is the same fight-back they’ve been trying to start since “Barnacle Brown” decided not to hold a General Election, and that the changes in the polling might have more to do with the the Tories being annoyingly certain about their impending victory in the media.
However – big however – as delusional as the New Statesman piece might be the simple fact remains that Labour can win the next general election. It’s possible.
As Tory Bear’s chums pile into the comments thread, they don’t realise that they’re actually helping Labour. The more attention they draw to it, the worse it’ll get. Assuming that Labour winning is impossible, that victory for the Tories is a dead certainty? That, above all else, is Labour’s one real chance of winning.
The biggest problem facing opponents of Labour remains 1001 things to criticise them for and a general inability to stick to one specific area and hammer it to death, and a general reluctance for anyone to spell out specifically what the alternatives might be. Too much public spending? Well the solution is mutter mutter mutter. Too much CCTV and control freakery? The solution is obviously mumble thingy wotsit, isn’t it? Taxes are too high? Well, obviously we need to mutter, mumble mumble waffle and blah.
Wait, what were those solutions again? Not one of the naughty, forbidden solutions that don’t involve more public spending, more regulation, more centralisation, more crimes, more punishments, more interference in people’s private lives and choices?
The response usually comes, “Well, let’s be clear about what we’re saying here: Mumble mumble mumble.”
If the campaign is going to be about pure personality and style over real policy, and if real policy debate is reduced to ‘we’re going to introduce the same policy but on a slightly different timescale with slightly different amounts of money with slightly different numbers of public sector workers” then you’d better have one seriously charming personality and be very stylish indeed.
So this General Election, rather than being a foregone conclusion, could well be building up into what counts as the mother of all fuck-ups for the Conservatives. Will they be able to reign in the triumphalism in time? Is it even possible to rein in the triumphalism of the Tory blogosphere?
So sorry, Tory Bear. I’m going to do you a favour and not join in the ‘lynch the New Statesman for being thick’ gang. I mean, they are thick and their post is pathetic, but that doesn’t mean Labour can’t beat you.
What would the Lib Dems do in the event of a hung parliament? The Tories are slipping down the polls (I’m blaming their constant “When we’re in government” tone, talking about Lisbon and the recent wave of pity for Gordon). It’s possible that no clear winner will emerge from the general election, forcing the parties to do deals with each other in order to form a government.
I thought this matter was settled. I thought Nick had ruled out a coalition with Labour. Apparently not!
The ground has shifted again and Nick Clegg has elaborated on the party’s position:
I start from a very simple first principle – it is not Gordon Brown or David Cameron or Nick Clegg who are kingmakers in British politics – it’s the British people.
So the votes of the British people are what should determine what happens afterwards.
… which all sounds fair enough, but he’s left himself some wriggle room here – does mandate mean popular vote or the number of seats? It’s a crucial question considering how few votes Labour needs to win a seat in comparison with the Conservatives (and the effect is exaggerated still further for the Liberal Democrats).
The idea that the public are the kingmakers is a noble one, but there’s a problem – the single biggest vote will be for the ‘couldn’t care less who wins’ party, that will make up anything between 40-60% of the eligible voters, making them the nearest thing to a ‘majority opinion.’
The real mandate is ‘do what you want, we don’t care, you’re all the same, my vote doesn’t matter anyway.’
Even if, say, the Tory and Lib Dem vote adds up to more than 50% of the votes of all eligible voters and they go into coalition, there’s still a problem: Neither party has a mandate from the majority for their policies, so how do you decide which policies to go with?
Or have we all got so used to the idea that the government doesn’t need a mandate from the majority (just a majority) that we don’t care anymore?
Lucky me! I’ve got another piece on Comment Is Free, in the Liberty Central section. Funnily enough, this may not be the strangest thing that happens today – if the other thing happens there may be a space-time paradox catastrophe event – you’ve been warned.
The piece is about whether or not it’s right for the Government to kick entire families off the internet without going through the courts (well, duh).
So here’s the key question: do we want to live in a society where people can be cut off from the internet without a trial, without a jury and without proving they committed any offence at all?
There's no referendum the Lib Dems could support that would win.
In which I write stuff that people who already agree with me will agree with, and those that disagree will disagree.
You wanna know what I think?
Need to get this out of my system.
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