Forgive me for a moment: for the first time I can think of in this blog I’m going to be political. I’ll try to be brief.
It’s not especially a secret that I’m a leftie. I’ve not talked about it much here, but I suspect you could decode it from my posts, and especially via Twitter. So it won’t come as much of a surprise that in the upcoming general election I’m backing Labour.
As the election looms it’s looking increasingly likely from the opinion polls that the UK will get a hung parliament on Thursday. Accordingly the Queen would invite Gordon Brown, as the incumbent Prime Minister, to form the next government. It’s likely that Mr Brown would then approach the Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg in an attempt to form some kind of anti-Tory coalition government. For a moment I’m going to assume this happens — that the Liberal Democrats would rather form a coalition with the Labour Party than the Conservative party.
It struck me the other day while listening to Andrew Pierce and Kevin Maguire talking about the Labour leadership on the radi0, that there’s still a way the Labour Party can come out of this election (for a definition of “this” see below) with a strong mandate to run the country for another 5 years. Let me explain. [read more]
I read an interesting blog post earlier this week – “To read or not to read?” – written by an MA broadcast journalism student. In it he talks about the ethics surrounding reading other people’s text messages without their consent. He uses this example to illustrate a point regarding investigative journalism as a whole. While we agree on the main point in question, I’m not sure I agreed with everything he says. I’d recommend you go and have a look at his post, and my comments at the end, as I’m not going to repeat them here.
Then, this weekend, I spotted a copy of The Daily Telegraph on the train open on an article titled “The Mandy and Osborne Show had us in stitches”, so I had a look. The article I had initially seen was, in fact, not very interesting at all (some comments by an actress about The Spectator’s Parliamentarian of the Year awards), but the item above it was. The section I was reading was the comment section, and the piece above related to the current economic climate. The article is clearly comment – it’s not hard fact, it’s one writer’s opinion on the way Gordon Brown has handled the slow down in the economy. As good comment should be it’s a very biased article. [read more]