And another thing…

IN KEEPING with my (slightly) new look election-ready masthead to the blog, here’s a video that’s as close to the positive message I advocated two months ago, arguing that Labour could do worse than try to replicate Ronald Reagan’s outstandingly effective partly election broadcast, “It’s morning again in America”.

This is about as close as we’ve come so far, and it’s actually pretty powerful, although I still think we could do with some of the emotion and heartstring-tugging the Americans are so good at.

Hat-tip to Allan Davies:

AN AWFUL thought, I admit, but could Daniel Hannan be right?

In this post over at Three Line Whip, the Conservative MEP takes issue with my post on Hazel Blears’s now infamous “YouTube if you want to” article. I asserted that, in agreement with Hazel, broadcasting yourself on the interweb was no substitute for knocking on doors. Daniel reminds me that I actually described YouTube’s impact on political campaigning as “miniscule”.

So, yes, I mis-spoke (or mis-wrote? Mis-blogged?). 

The point I was trying to make is that as far as my own electorate is concerned, I will reach more of them through a morning’s door-knocking than by blogging or gurning away on YouTube. But Daniel’s piece has forced me to admit that even that point may not be accurate. And the fact is I have no way of knowing exactly how many of my constituents, for instance, read this blog, or would watch me if I did produce anything remotely worth watching on YouTube.

Certainly, as happened with Gordon’s “MPs’ expenses” video, a YouTube video usually only becomes big news when the mainstream media pick up on it. Yet Daniel was a beneficiary of an entirely different phenomenon: a YouTube video that gained a massive audience in its own right long before being noticed by the main TV news programmes.

What really excites me about web broadcasting is that it provides a platform that doesn’t depend on either the subjective judgment of a news editor or the rules that prevent parties and candidates paying for advertising on TV. It’s free, so it creates a far more level playing field than a commercial environment where the richest candidate or party has the advantage. 

Perhaps not at the next general election (though things are moving so fast, so who knows?), but at some point, web-based coverage could be the deciding factor in a UK general election. Today, right now, the chipmunk Hazel is correct: if all our efforts were invested in new media and none in on-the-ground campaigning, we would suffer badly. But that won’t be the case for much longer.

On this one, Daniel Hannan is way ahead of the game, and way ahead of me. I hate it when that happens.

HAZEL Blears is right when she says that for politicians, using YouTube is “no substitute for knocking on doors or setting up a stall in the town centre.”

To most political activists, such a comment is a statement of the bleedin’ obvious (as Basil Fawlty might say). YouTube broadcasting has its place, she might have gone on to add, but its impact is miniscule compared with on-the-ground campaigning.

But the fact that Hazel has herself used YouTube extensively in the past is justification, it seems, for The Spectator Coffee House blog to brand her “a massive hypocrite” (not sure if “massive” can be used to describe Hazel, but let’s put that to one side lest I’m accused of size-ism). Someone calling himself Small Man has jumped to the odd conclusion that because she has used the internet video platform herself in the past, she has no right to suggest that there are better, more effective ways of campaigning. Hazel wrote that there are better ways of campaigning — she absolutely didn’t claim that we shouldn’t use YouTube at all. Yet another case of the media insisting on painting things as black and white because a nuanced argument is beyond them.

For what it’s worth, I don’t think Gordon’s YouTube video on MPs’ expenses was wise; he’s clearly less comfortable with the medium than, say, John Prescott, and someone at Number 10 should have had the good sense to tell him that before it was posted.

But he doesn’t need to use YouTube — he’s the Prime Minister, for goodness sake! He has access to a wider range of conventional media than any of the rest of us will ever have. YouTube democratises broadcasting in the same way blogging can offer a platform to those who wouldn’t normally have access to the print media. YouTube is useful because it’s accessible and instant, not because it’s “cool” and “down with the kidz”.

JOHN Prescott is right, of course, to hail the viral impact of the Daniel Hannan video on YouTube as a sign of things to come.

I was about to write a second paragraph along the lines of “The way politics is covered is changing for good…” But that’s wrong. The growth of YouTube, blogging, Twitter and other forms of new media aren’t about “coverage” of politics because ‘coverage” is a one-way street; journalists tell us what they think we need/want to hear/read and we listen.

No longer. “Coverage” now means interactivity, dialogue, the electorate contributing their own perspective to the story of the day, or, indeed, breaking and shaping their own stories. The traditional (I hate the expression “dead tree press”) media just can’t do that. 

I was chatting to Tory MP Douglas Carswell (Hannan’s co-conspirator, as it happens) in the Members’ Lobby this week, and we were reflecting on the power of YouTube after the Hannan phenomenon (needless to say, he disagreed with my view that Hannan shouldn’t have attacked his prime minister on foreign soil, but let’s not re-open that one here). Not for the first time, I speculated about the scenario of every single candidate standing in all 646 seats in a general election each having a personal blog which they updated regularly throughout the campaign without interference from their parties’ HQs.

Scary stuff. And pretty chaotic, in all likelihood. That kind of development would radically change the whole nature of the party system. Who would want to be a general election co-ordinator when most, if not all, of your candidates were uploading their daily thoughts onto YouTube?

If anyone out there has an idea about how new media could change politics in general and general elections in particular, feel free to let us know.

IF it’s not possible to post a YouTube video on a blog or other site without the sure and certain knowledge that you’re not breaking the law, then we’re all in trouble.

The recent debate sparked on this site by an intervention by one “wibbler” late last night  is very relevant for those of us with a vested interest in the future of blogging. At the moment, this site can only use YouTube video, and I am currently unable to embed any other form of video (this will change with And another thing… Version 4.0, due along soon).

If I can’t legally post something as inoccuous as Christmas music videos, then that really is incredibly – and unnecessarily – restrictive. “Wibble” insists it is illegal, while another commenter, Mike Rouse, claims the onus is on the person who uploaded the video to YouTube in the first place to make sure that all copyright permissions have been obtained. I certainly haven’t seen any disclaimer on YouTube that watching or posting any of its videos might incur legal action. 

And anyway, is posting a YouTube video on a third party site technically distribution at all? YouTube videos can’t be stored, only watched online. So when I “embed” one, all it is is a link to the original video over at YouTube. Hardly the same as a file-sharing programme like Kazaa which allows MP3 and other file formats to be actually copied from one computer to another across a network.

I understand what people are saying about MPs’ responsibilty for reviewing the law on copyright, and I accept that as a blogging MP, I’m an obvious target for criticism in this respect. Yet changes in copyright laws are not going to happen quickly, and even if copyright extended for only 25 years instead of 70 or 50 years, it wouldn’t remove the immediate problem we have with most videos on YouTube (and certainly wouldn’t affect the current legal status of  Ms Carey’s “All I Want For Christmas Is You”).

(And yes, Labour Matters, my immediate response to legal action is to try to cover myself by removing the offendig video – sorry if that disappoints you, but I have no interest in becoming bankrupt or , indeed, of breaking the law once made aware of a possible infringement.)

Are there any lawyers out there who would care to offer some free advice, not just to me but to everyone else interested in this area?

NOT being a tech-head, exactly, I’ve been going round the houses a bit in my attempts to post video footage of my recent performances in the Commons on my parliamentary website.

I’ve finally managed it, but only after hours of streaming video from Parliament Live TV, editing in QuickTime Pro, then uploading to YouTube.

The quality’s rubbish. The sound and vision aren’t too hot either…

But the parliamentary authorities don’t exactly make it easy to source this kind of footage, so until I’ve worked out a better way of doing it, this will have to do.

SOMETIMES the stress of having to come up with new subjects to blog gets to me, I admit it…

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=itCjzJEhyCU]