Pages

Thursday 5 March 2015

I say vicar…it’s a farce.

To say that the current state of play over TV debates before the General Election is a complete farce is an under-statement.  No one has come out of this slow-motion disaster with any real credit.  The broadcasters clearly did not think through their plans sufficiently by initially excluding the Greens but, having addressed that issue, they are still denying the Northern Irish parties any role in the planned debates.  So they still haven’t got it.  Either you include all the political parties with MPs in Parliament or just forget it.  The DUP is still considering taking legal action and I think—based on even the tightest legal definition of ‘reasonableness’—that they have a good chance of winning.  If it is ‘reasonable’ to include the Greens, then it is undoubtedly reasonable to include the DUP which had many times more MPs. 

I can’t see how the group of broadcasters responsible for coming up with the plan for the debates failed to appreciate just how unfair and unreasonable their decisions have been, when the solution was blindingly obvious.  The critical distinction is not whether political parties have MPs in Westminster but whether those MPs are members of a UK party.  This means that the UK debates should be between the Conservatives, Labour, Liberal Democrats, Greens and UKIP.  This does not mean the other national parties are excluded from debate but their involvement should be confined to televised debates in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.  This is so obvious a distinction that I’m surprised that no broadcaster appears to have come up with it. 

Politicians have been equally culpable.  David Cameron, a staunch advocate of the debates in 2010, had done just about everything he can to stymie them in 2015.  His argument appears to be that if the debates are held during the campaigns, then they’ll ‘suck the air out of them’.  The threat of the empty podium, one response from the broadcasters, is simply childish and is something that equally might be challenged in the courts.  Ed Miliband, the Martini man…any time any where, any place…is little better and was quite prepared to accept that the Greens not be included…he can hardly claim the moral high-ground on the issue. 

The problem is that politicians of whatever party want the debates to be structured to benefit them while the broadcasters want good television and neither should, on the basis of the fiasco that has evolved, be left in charge of anything to do with it.  Far better for a body like the Electoral Commission to draw up the structure of the debates and that political parties and broadcasters have no right of veto over them.  Having the debates is something that the electorate overwhelmingly support but I fear that the issue has become so toxic that it might be better if they did not take place at all.

Monday 2 March 2015

Reaching a thousand

I’ve been blogging regularly since July 2007 on my two blogs Looking at History and the History Zone, putting the posts I write on both.  Both sites are designed to promote history as a subject as well as providing me with a vehicle for putting forward my own ideas on the subject as well as on current political issues.  History Zone began life as a blog on Windows Live before migrating to WordPress at the beginning of October 2010; Looking at History has used the Google blog platform from the outset.  The only reason for having two blogs with broadly the same material is the result of a comment from a friend who said it would allow me to maximise audiences.  He was right…Looking at History has had over 830,000 hits in the intervening years while History Zone  has had a mere 71,000…such is the influence of Google as a search engine. In many respects the blogs acted as first drafts of material that later found its way into some of my published books and though marketing was not one of the reasons why I began blogging, it is now an integral part of my marketing strategies. 

Both blogs are now within spitting distance of a thousand posts, an average of 125 posts a year or just over two a week.  This reinforces the point made by many professional bloggers that the key to building and retaining an audience is to post regularly and, in the case of political comments, make them current…little point in commenting on the question of tuition fees two weeks after politicians proposed to reduce them from £9,000 to £6,000 should they win the General Election.  That, and their subject matter, has resulted in building a large audience in the UK, United States, Canada and Australia but also in Germany, France, Ukraine, Russia, Spain and India.  At this moment, the blog is being looked at in the UK, Australia, United States, Germany, Italy, Switzerland, Algeria, Kenya, the Netherlands and the Philippines using computers, phones, tablets and iPads.  The blogs have become truly global in their audience, have been referred to on other blogs and have even found their way into several academic books.

Many people begin blogging with good intentions only to fail after a few posts or the posts become so irregular that the blog ends up lacking an real coherence.  I was lucky in that I had a pretty good idea about what my intentions for the blogs and, though they have evolved over the years, those intentions remain largely unchanged.  So I plan to continue doing what I’m doing and what I enjoy and hope that my audience agrees.