This short book, published by Demos and mostly written by Jamie Bartlett, Jonathan Birdwell and Mark Littler, presents the results of a large and detailed survey of Facebook supporters of populist far-right movements in various western European countries, including the EDL and BNP in the UK and Vlaams Belang here. (Hungary’s Jobbik was included in the original project but dropped for reasons not really explained.) The results are interesting in various ways. Supporters of such groups tend to have much less trust in the judicial system, their own government, the European Union and the mainstream media than most people do. But they also tend to have a belief in the political process (which is I suppose why they are in organised groups in the first place), usually motivated by concerns over immigration and perceptions of Islam. I wish (and I think the researchers wish) that they had also included a question or questions about the use of political violence; Norway was added to the list of countries surveyed after the Breivik attacks in June. There is an interesting discussion in the appendix of the methodology and ethics of conducting research among Facebook users, and also how to spot trolls and remove their answers. Worth a look.
Monthly Archives: November 2011
November Books 11) The Demon Headmaster, by Gillian Cross
Gillian Cross was a new writer for me; I enjoyed this children’s story of sinister headmaster with supernatural powers planning to Take Over The World, a blended family, commentary on children’s TV game shows, and knowing winks to Nineteen Eighty-four. Will look out for the sequels if F enjoys it too. Thanks to
November Books 10) Race of a Lifetime, by John Heilemann and Mark Halperin
This is a brilliant account of the 2008 US presidential election, concentrating particularly on the Obama/Clinton dynamic (since that turned out to be much more important and durable than the Obama/McCain dynamic). The authors claim to have got detailed accounts from campaign insiders of key conversations and exchanges right up to the level of the candidates, and it rings true without revealing anything about the two key personalities that I had not already guessed. (It seems to have been published as Game Change in the USA.)
Three aspects of the narrative really struck me.
First, that the candidates themselves tend to be pretty flawed human beings. Successively the Edwards and McCain campaigns crashed to disaster largely because of the personalities of Edwards and McCain themselves, unwilling to adapt to the discipline necessary to keep their teams motivated and to avoid gaffes to the press. Both Obama and McCain suffered serious wobbles in the last few weeks before the election due to the indiscipline of their running-mates. All of those individuals had previous won elections for public office, so it is surprising that Edwards and McCain were not able to deal with the demands of the presidential campiagn. I can cut Biden and Palin a bit more slack, as the vice-presidential slot is much more peculiar, and perhaps Edwards is explicable because he was in complete denial about the state of his marriage. But McCain’s behaviour is just bizarre.
Second, and linked to the first point, the peculiar desire of the media – particular the US media – for spectacle rather than story means that any electoral campaign is vulnerable to a single killer moment. Occasionally – as with Hillary Clinton’s tearful interview in New Hampshire, which it is pretty clear won her the primary there – it works to the candidate’s advantage. Much more often, of course, it reacts to their disadvantage, as Rick Perry is discovering.
Third, and also linked to the first point, the fact that the US system is so very candidate-based rather than party-based makes the professional campaigner’s career much more volatile and much more based on personality. That has consequences for how campaigns work internally. Staffers are jockeying not only to get the credit for getting their candidate elected, but also for positioning in the victorious candidate’s administration and/or for a better-paid role in the next campaign. It can also be much more difficult to tell the candidate home truths about their own performance, compared to the situation if both candidate and staffer are beholden to a political party structure rather than staffers being utterly dependent on the candidate’s whim. It also feeds into the dependence of the campaigns on continual fund-raising.
In the end, Obama won because his fundamentals were sound; he had a good narrative in the first place, he was disciplined about sticking to it, and he was fortunate in both the character of his opponent in the general election and the economic circumstances which made Republicans unelectable in 2008. Clinton was unlucky in that her narrative was almost as good and her discipline equal to Obama’s, but her campaign team was less coherent (for the reasons given above) and she carried unfair negative baggage in the shape of her husband. McCain lost because he deserved to. (The authors are surprisingly sympathetic to Sarah Palin, and blame McCain for choosing her without sufficient forethought and exposing her on the national platform without adequate preparation.) An excellent book from which I learned some interesting things.
Top unread non-fiction:
Peleponnesian War | Innocents Abroad | Terre des Hommes | The Hero with a Thousand Faces | Race of a Lifetime / Game Change | Proust and the Squid | The Tipping Point | Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl | Elementary Forms of Religious Life | Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man | History of Christianity | History of the World in 100 Objects | A Room of One’s Own | Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? | The Last Mughal | Reading the Oxford English Dictionary | Jane Austen | Homage to Catalonia | The Road to Middle Earth | Essence of Christianity | The Strangest Man
November Books 9) I Shall Wear Midnight, by Terry Pratchett
As I had hoped, an excellent novel rounding off the Tiffany Aching series, with a surprise appearance from someone we last saw much earlier in the Discworld stories. It deals with some pretty heavy subject matter in Pratchett’s trademark combination of humour and profundity. Some day soon I shall go back and read all four Tiffany novels in sequence.
Excellent final quote from the author on the importance of history:
It is important that we know where we come from, because if you do not know where you come from, then you don’t know where you are, and if you don’t know where you are, you don’t know where you’re going. And if you don’t know where you’re going, you’re probably going wrong.
The Colour of Magic | The Light Fantastic | Equal Rites | Mort | Sourcery | Wyrd Sisters | Pyramids | Guards! Guards! | Eric | Moving Pictures | Reaper Man | Witches Abroad | Small Gods | Lords and Ladies | Men at Arms | Soul Music | Interesting Times | Maskerade | Feet of Clay | Hogfather | Jingo | The Last Continent | Carpe Jugulum | The Fifth Elephant | The Truth | Thief of Time | The Last Hero | The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents | Night Watch | The Wee Free Men | Monstrous Regiment | A Hat Full of Sky | Going Postal | Thud! | Wintersmith | Making Money | Unseen Academicals | I Shall Wear Midnight | Snuff | Raising Steam | The Shepherd’s Crown
Interesting Links for 11-11-2011
- Desperation of hope
Encounter with a carjacker in Karachi.
- watervole: Happy Music
Certainly cheered me up – thanks, Judith!
- The Marianas Trench
The Marianas Trench is deep. Really deep. You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly deep it is. I mean, you may think it’s a long way down the road to the chemist, but that’s just peanuts to the Marianas Trench.
- UUP leader rejects Tory merger plan – Politics, News – Belfasttelegraph.co.uk
“The leader of the Ulster Unionists has rejected a Conservative Party proposal that they disband and become a Northern Ireland wing of the Tories.” – an extraordinarily tone-deaf offer, incomprehensible.
- bearing responsibility. | meg fowler
The best post I have read about the Penn State scandal.
Interesting Links for 10-11-2011
- Graphic portrayals: Northern Ireland, graphic novels and the peace process « Slugger O’Toole
Gordon Gillespie tells all.
- 1978 Tom Baker school visit footage
Belfast gets a visit from the Fourth Doctor. “Time Lords do not acknowledge sectarian divides. This is a simple fact.” “A Time Lord came and visited us at a very bad time.”
- 539 – Vive le tweet! A Map of Twitter’s Languages | Strange Maps | Big Think
Fascinating – Belgium and Switzerland invisible, Thailand way more prominent than its neighbours.
- WHSmith have pulled off a publishing coup
I wonder what they are charging?
- Google+ had a chance to compete with Facebook. Not anymore.
The failure of Google’s attempt to capture social networks.(I check in on my Google+ account maybe once a week.)
Graphic novels about Northern Ireland
My old friend Gordon Gillespie gave a talk on this subject yesterday, covered by Slugger O’Toole here.
November Books 8) Ivanhoe, by Walter Scott
I had tried Ivanhoe several years ago and bounced off it;
Interesting Links for 8-11-2011
- Two EU Parliament committees reject EU-Morocco Fish Pact – fishelsewhere.eu
“European Parliament’s Development and Budget Committee both adopted an opinion calling on Parliament to reject the EU-Morocco fisheries agreement.” - Evil social networks
What’s wrong with #Klout
Sabotage on the railway line, 1943
In the early morning of 31 July 1943, our village's peaceful slumbers were interrupted by an explosion on the railway line to the south. The Resistance had successfully attacked a German troop transport, causing fairly substantial damage to the train itself and to the railway line.
(Pictures copied from this article.)
Although local legend speaks of 250 dead Germans, and reprisals prevented by a local cigar manufacturer who bought off the Nazi commandant with a barrel of cognac, the truth appears to be that five Wehrmacht and two local Belgian railway staffers were killed, a couple of dozen wounded, and twelve carriages and, most dramatically, the locomotive were derailed. The Resistance set off the bomb with electrical cables salvaged from the brief war of 1940, which were of English manufacture and therefore allowed the embarrassed Germans to pretend that British parachutists were responsible.
One sunny morning last weekend I decided to try and locate the bridge where all this happened. It is here, down a very overgrown lane, just about visible on Google Earth. I had difficulty in deciding if the train had fallen off the eastern or western side of the bridge (the line runs more or less north-south here); in the end I think it is the eastern side, partly because I think the sun may be on the left in the comtemporary pictures (though I suspect it was a cloudy day) and partly because the train was coming from Leuven at the time of the attack, and since Belgian trains presumably then as now were on the left track it would have been on the eastern side of the line.
Going back to the eastern side, I reckon this is the corner that features particularly in the first, second and fourth photos above (incidentally the fourth picture is clearly taken from an elevated standpoint, perhaps on top of the carriage visible in the second photo and being lifted away in the fifth):
And this is the eastern side from a different angle:
All very quiet and neglected now. But very odd to look at the scene of the attack sixty-eight years later.
November Books 7) Pack Animals, by Peter Anghelides
A Torchwood novel set towards the end of Season 2, with Owen already dead but still walking and alien creatures intruding on Earth via sets of game cards (so the ‘pack’ of the title has a dual meaning). Another good effort from Anghelides, reinforcing my view that the Torchwood novels are an insufficiently recognised literary achievement of the Whoniverse.
November Books 6) The Private Eye Annual 2008, edited by Ian Hislop
I hadn’t got around to reading this until now, and it was quite amusing to be submerged again in the long-ago world of 2008, when Gordon Brown had just become Prime Minister and the US presidential campaign was just getting under way. A lot of the humour is childish rather than undergraduate, but some of the barbs are still telling: an advertisement for putting your money Under The Bed (instant access twenty-four hours a day, but not regulated under the financial services compensation scheme), for instance. I love the list of made-up facts about the Queen and Prince Philip:
Although the Duke comes from Greek. Danish, German and English stock, he speaks none of those languages.
And the story under the headline Nationwide Fury Erupts As Archbishop ‘Converts To Islam’ is actually an acerbic deconstruction of the political / media rhetoric on Islam generally, with this cutting sidebar:
That Shock Lecture In Full – The Words That Shook The Nation
followed by a spoof of opaque theological commentary. I don’t always agree with the Eye’s target or line but I am glad that its sæva indignatio continues.
Gibbon Chapter LXVI: The Eastern Empire and the Popes
In this chapter, the successive emperors and popes of the early fifteenth century negotiate (again) union between the churches. The increased contact between East and West causes the Renaissance. See also my thoughts on kissing and the English, the filioque debate, the number of students at Oxford, how one might miss out on becoming Pope, Ancient Greek pronunciation, and the Renaissance.
November Books 5) Diana Wynne Jones, by Farah Mendlesohn
An excellent, thorough look at the works of the much-missed author, taking us through how Jones educates her readers subtly through her writing, which made me want to fill in the large gaps in my own reading of her works. By fortunate coincidence, the Diana Wynne Jones issue of Vector arrived just as I was finishing this, which gave me a chance to reflect on why Jones was such a good writer in from several other perspectives as well (also a transcript of a discussion in which the genesis of this book is explained). Very stimulating, even if I can’t find many words to write about it for now.
Interesting Links for 6-11-2011
- McDonnell faces immediate questions and longer term dilemmas
@bbcmarkd on the new SDLP leader. - Air Space – a trip through an airport detention center – Boing Boing
What being on the TSA watches is like.
Klout and influence
There was an interesting discussion on Twitter yesterday between Charlie Stross and Pat Cadigan about Klout.com, which I vaguely knew of as one of those sites that attempts to measure how wide and effective your use of social media is, attributing to me expertise and authority on subjects about which I know little and tweet less. Klout had further annoyed me by unilaterally changing their algorithm to decrease my Klout score and then demanding that I change my behaviour to increase it back again, which didn't interest me at all.
@cstross made the excellent point that Klout's data-mining of our Twitter and Facebook accounts is ethically dubious and its opt-out rather than opt-in practice is actually against EU law (ah, how I remember the days of lobbying the European Parliament on that one), and that was sufficient to move me to opt out.
Later in the day, Northern Ireland's Social Democratic and Labour Party elected its new leader. Delegates chose the Member of Parliament (and of the Northern Ireland Assembly) for South Belfast, Alasdair McDonnell, whose candidacy I had endorsed in a blog post on Wednesday (reprinted on the popular site Slugger O'Toole on Thursday). I doubt that more than a couple of dozen SDLP delegates read my piece in either place, and I would be very surprised if I changed the minds of more than a very few (and McDonnell's winning margin was a healthy 36 votes out of almost 350). I can tell you that Livejournal thinks that 75 people looked at it as their point of entry, compared with 53 for the preceding entry about the beards of Democratic Party candidates for the US Presidency and 149 for the following entry about Tintin. It was tweeted by two people who both have fewer followers on Twitter than I do, but probably are more connected to the Northern Irish social media world than I am – one is the communications officer of a prominent Belfast NGO, and the other is, er, Alasdair McDonnell MP. None of the other half-dozen pieces on Slugger about the SDLP leadership attracted fewer comments than mine.
I think Klout – or any naive data-mining algorithm – would have real difficulty in assessing whether or not that piece was influential, let alone whether I am influential, just from the numbers. To give another (and rather appropriate) example, my re-posting of the graphic of Where Should You Post Your Status?, which had been doing the rounds on Facebook, got 100 distinct views on Livejournal, but was also tweeted by five other people (and retweeted by a sixth), only one of whom I actually know, so the others put it into completely new networks, thus increasing my "deep reach" for that particular post (which however is probably of less historical import than the selection of the new leader of the SDLP). For another example of "deep reach", my reaction to the Stross/Cadigan discussion caught the attention of Rosi Sexton, whose twitter following probably doesn't have a lot of overlap with mine, let alone the two sf authors', and so the Klout discussion is brought to the attention of a whole new audience. But I suspect that the "deep reach" of a single post is normally pretty ephemeral; even if it can be measured, it is only a very small part of a bigger picture.
I like looking at attempts to tease structure out of the sea of information that we are all providing online. But I think any attempts to reduce one person’s impact to a single number should be treated with suspicion, and further efforts to make money out of such a dubious process should be treated with disdain and shunning.
SDLP leadership
For the record, the results were:
| Alasdair McDonnell | 127 | 140 | 188 |
| Conall McDevitt | 105 | 131 | 152 |
| Patsy McGlone | 70 | 76 | – |
| Alex Attwood | 46 | – | – |
Attwood's transfers went 26 to McDevitt, 13 to McDonnell, 6 to McGlone (1 plumper); McGlone's transfers went 48 to McDonnell, 21 to McDevitt (seven non-transferable). (Figures from @KenReid_utv.) Congrats to McDonnell; commiserations to the other candidates.
Ian Parsley jokes that I am responsible, but I rather doubt it!
November Books 4) Autumn Mist, by David A. McIntee
When I posted three years ago about appearances of Belgium in Doctor Who,
Interesting Links for 5-11-2011
- Scottish Conservatives elect gay leader
Aged 32, she joined in 2009 and fought first election this year. - Edward Lear (1812-1888)
Tom Shakespeare on the nonsense poet and landscape artist who also had epilepsy. - BBC Breakfast – Sadie Miller interview – YouTube
Elisabeth Sladen’s daughter on the new posthumous autobiography. - Laurie Penny: A woman’s opinion is the mini-skirt of the internet
“Many commentators, wondering aloud where all the strong female voices are, close their eyes to how normal this sort of threat has become.” - Asteroid 2005 YU55 to Approach Earth on November 8, 2011
400m wide rock coming closer than the Moon.
Interesting Links for 4-11-2011
- Occupy Wall Street Group Looks For Financial System Fixes
Innovative planning “to build a banking system with democratic management, more direct relationships between borrowers and investors and products affordable and attractive to the rich and poor”. - New Statesman – “You should have your tongue ripped out”: the reality of sexist abuse online
Shocking, but essential reading. - Opinion: USAID is foreign policy’s best dollar value – J. Brian Atwood and Henrietta Holsman Fore and M. Peter McPherson and Andrew Natsios – POLITICO.com
– especially democratisation. - NYT: Is Obama Toast?
Nate Silver answers with a definite (and detailed) “maybe”. - Take my money or die
Hugh Pope reviews “We Meant Well: how I helped lose the battle for the hearts and minds of the Iraqi people”. - World Bank eAtlas of Gender
The World Bank’s take. - The Global Gender Gap Report 2011
The World Economic Forum’s take. - 5 Backup Plans That Would Have Changed Modern History | Cracked.com
Re the proposed 1945 US land invasion of Japan: “The Military was so certain things were about to go very badly for U.S. soldiers that 500,000 Purple Hearts were made in preparation, a number so large that the medals have been used to supply every single war since, including Korea, Vietnam, Iraq I and Iraq II, with about 100,000 still left over.” - How to make chocolate icosahedra with numbers on
Decorate your wedding cake with d20s!
Interesting Links for 3-11-2011
- Orwell’s other island
Ken MacLeod on Jura and Orwell’s political legacy. - democracyarsenal.org: Shadowboxing with Wolves
Heather on the craziness of not talking to the other side. - Rescuing Children in Wartime: Nevil Shute’s Pied Piper | Tor.com
Jo returns to a brilliant book.
Interesting Links for 2-11-2011
- peterbirks: Sort of calling it a day
Pete explains why he is giving up online poker. - The other horn of Africa – Opinion – Al Jazeera English
President Silanyo: “Behind stock images of a region trapped in chaos, economies are growing and governance is improving.” - A Sister’s Eulogy for Steve Jobs – NYTimes.com
“We all — in the end — die in medias res. In the middle of a story. Of many stories… What I learned from my brother’s death was that character is essential: What he was, was how he died.” - Evidence-based politics – NI parties « Ian James Parsley
“In 2010, compared with the previous Westminster election in 2005, making allowance for boundary changes, the UUP vote was down almost 5% in South Belfast and almost 10% in East Belfast, and your own result in North Down was 32.5% below that of the UUP in the previous election. I think it is not unfair to look at those results and say that the link with the Tories was not given a ringing endorsement.” - “But where do I start?” Some suggestions for the overwhelmed « Francesca Elston
Start with physical self-care; Get some help; Practise patience; Surf your energy. - RT @StinaLeicht: Sexual Harassment at SF Conventions
Grim reading. - The secret of self-control : The New Yorker
Can you delay gratification? - The Spirit of the Kakanian Province – Asymptote
Dubravka Ugrešić on Austro-Hungarian literature. - European democracy — Crooked Timber
European politicians have preferred to integrate by stealth rather than public debate. But they cannot do that any more.
Where should you post your status?
A useful guide for the perplexed. (Originally from http://www.breakingcopy.com/social-media-flowchart-status – NB pained but unconvincing comments from Google Plus users!)
The Tintin Movie (and the books it is based on)
I took advantage of yesterday's public holiday to take F to see the new Tintin film, which has credits for Stephen Spielberg, Stephen Moffatt and Peter Jackson and so can reasonably expect to be the bearer of high expectations. Unfortunately I realised while we were out that I was coming down with some bug, and have spent most of the time since we came back from the cinema in bed, with no energy for doing anything much more than reading the three Tintin volumes that the film is based on (The Crab With The Golden Claws, The Secret of the Unicorn and Red Rackham's Treasure) and writing rambling blog entries.
I enjoyed the film.
The politics are somewhat dubious – it barely passes the first step of the Bechdel test, with Mrs Finch and Bianca Castafiore, who do not meet let alone talk about anything – but there at least it is faithful to the original. The two scenes that I found most memorable were Captain Haddock reliving his ancestor's encounter with the pirate Red Rackham, and Thomson and Thompson's confrontation with the kleptomaniac Aristides Silk, both of which are magnified and frankly improved from equivalent episodes in the original Secret of the Unicorn book (the twins/pickpocket scene definitely one of Moffatt’s great moments). It's an entertaining film, though I think not a great one; and I'm prepared to allow Spielberg, Moffatt and Jackson the occasional bit of work that is merely good rather than excellent. Andy "Gollum" Serkis as Captain Haddock and Daniel "James Bond" Craig as the villainous Sakharine/Rackham particularly excel.
Crab's contributions to the film include the story of how Tintin and Captain Haddock actually meet, and the sea voyage and landing for an exciting time in a Moroccan port. I noted several changes from these elements as they were adapted for the screen. First off, Haddock's destructive alcoholism, which teeters on the edge of being really not funny in the film, has actually been toned down from the book where he repeatedly and deliberately endangers himself and others for the sake of his addiction. I think the film makers moved this in the right direction, though not necessarily far enough. Once we reach Morocco, Omar Ben Salaad has been transformed from scheming Arab merchant and drug smuggler to genial local potentate with a taste for model ships and opera singers, who then gets his palace and town smashed up by Tintin and his enemies; and finally – think I caught this right – the seaplane which attacks Tintin, Haddock and Snowy is mysteriously said to have Portuguese markings in the film rather than Moroccan as in the book (which would make more sense). While the upgrading of Ben Salaad's character to victim rather than villain is probably an improvement, he still has an offensively silly name and the commander of the desert army fort is still mysteriously white.
Anyway, @quarsan asked me for a summary review, which is that the film is good but not great, and the books are well worth reading but there is better to come.
The SDLP leadership candidates, ranked on internet use and internal organisation
Northern Ireland's Social Democratic and Labour Party elects its fifth leader this coming weekend, with four male candidates in the running (the deputy leadership has been filled, without contest, by a woman). Since 1998, when the party topped the first preference tallies for the first Assembly election, the SDLP has lost votes and seats at almost every election cycle (the one exception being a sliver of a gain at the last European election) and now runs consistently 10% behind Sinn Féin, whereas twenty years ago it was the other way round. Margaret Ritchie, elected leader in early 2010, did not reverse the trend, and announced in the summer that she would not be a candidate for the leadership at this month's conference. The new leader faces quite a challenge.
I have never been an SDLP member and I am not an SDLP supporter, and in any case I live in Belgium so my views are of limited relevance to the party delegates making up their minds this weekend. I certainly won't presume to judge the candidates on their political vision – I am not sure that I was right to make those judgements of the UUP candidates last year. I will note that all four advocate a United Ireland, and all four have slightly different ideas of how to get there; since I don't think that we will get there any time soon, this is not a subject that interests me tremendously.
I am, however, interested both in political communications using the internet, and in the detail of party organisation, and here I think I have enough data to rank the candidates fairly objectively in terms of their performance on the first and their credibility on the second. So I have duly done so.
Probably the last thing I did in Northern Irish politics as a participant rather than an analyst was to manage the website for one of the candidates in the last Alliance Party leadership election, back in 2001. (He won, by 86 votes to 45, though I cannot claim that the excellence of his website was a crucial factor.) Today, quite apart from websites, politicians have the options of Twitter and Facebook open to them. How do the SDLP contenders rank?
4) Alex Attwood has no personal website, no twitter account and appears to be invisible on Facebook. The http://www.alexattwood.com site belongs to a composer of incidental music for films and TV. There is a fake (and frankly not very funny) Twitter account for him at @AlexAttwood. As with McDonnell, I got his manifesto after phoning his office to see if they could send it to me.
3) Alasdair McDonnell's website is curiously silent about his leadership aspirations, and as with Attwood I had to phone his office to get his manifesto. But unlike Attwood he has a Facebook page and is vigorous on Twitter.
2) Not long ago I would have easily ranked Conall McDevitt first on performance in this area, with almost twice as many friends on Facebook as the other candidates combined and a vigorous Twitter presence. However, like McDonnell, his website is curiously silent about his leadership, his manifesto being available online at Scribd. His facebook page has two blog addresses, one of which is defunct and the other last updated in early 2009. So he loses points for failure to update and integrate.
1) Patsy McGlone has a dedicated website featuring his leadership manifesto at http://www.patsymcglone.com/, as well as being on Facebook and Twitter. I cannot quite give him full marks though; although his campaign materials are easy to access, look nice and are well produced, they were not adequately proofed before publishing and a number of misprints have survived to the final version.
I don't think anyone should take the above ranking as the sole criterion for judging between the candidates, but it may just shift the balance between two who may be otherwise equally ranked.
Edited to add: I have been informed that some websites are constrained from referring to their owner's leadership campaigns. That may well be so; I can only report on the impression I get of joined-up campaigning.
I was the Alliance Party's Director of Elections / Political organiser for three years in the 1990s, and then spent two years in the Balkans training local political activists on party organisation and campaigning strategy (where I probably learned more from teaching than I had by doing). I don't know if improved internal organisation alone will be enough to help the SDLP reverse its slumping performance; but I doubt very much that such a reversal can be achieved otherwise. In fairness, all of the candidates realise this, and Attwood and McDonnell both put out separate manifesto documents on this point alone. Again, I found it pretty easy to rank the candidates rather objectively on the strength of their proposals in this area.
4) Conall McDevitt devotes least space to this issue, and unlike the other three I think that some of his ideas are actually wrong. He wants the SDLP to organise in the Republic, saying nothing about rebuilding in areas of weakness in the North where the party might actually contest elections and win seats; he wants the party's executive to connect better with local activists by making it smaller, an equation which I don't really see adding up; and he takes it upon himself to propose a new party constitution, sounding a bit like De Valera in 1937, without really mentioning how party activists will be involved with that process. On the other hand, he wants to convene all elected representatives regularly and to introduce a £1 membership fee for young people, senior citizens and those not working, which seem sensible enough ideas, and also talks about enhancing the role of the party's Central Council, a body of which I know nothing more than its name.
REVISED: 4) Alex Attwood's short paper (four pages, one of which is the cover sheet) on "Taking the SDLP Organisation Forward" starts off by demanding loyalty and discipline from members, and asking that "the Leader and Deputy Leader must have the authority to lead". I'm not quite sure what this all refers to but it sends an odd message, a bit of Das Volk hat das Vertrauen der Regierung verscherzt. He too wants to convene elected representatives regularly, and to move quickly to select candidates as soon as the party leadership has been given the new powers he wants (the document is curiously full of timelines). He praises the performance of his rivals in Mid Ulster and South Belfast in growing the party. I must say that would incline me to vote for a leadership candidate from Mid Ulster and South Belfast.
REVISED: 3) Conall McDevitt has now sent me a much more more detailed twelve-page paper with the title: "Uniting the SDLP: My Plan For Renewing Our Organisation" which I find a considerable improvement on the statements in his manifesto. In particular, two of the three ideas to which I objected are redrafted more sensibly here, in terms of building SDLP support groups in the Republic – "we will, of course, be focussed on growing our organisation in the North, particularly in those constituencies where we have suffered major decline" – and delivering a new party constitution, which is now to be drafted by a working group. I still don't see how a smaller Executive is going to be better at engaging the grass-roots, but that may not matter. As well as convening elected members and the Central Council regularly, and discounted membership fees, he also proposes early selection of candidates, training and performance monitoring for prospective candidates, and a permanent election directorate. I am not sure if performance monitoring for prospective candidates is such a good idea – sounds like this is a reference to problems that I don't know about – and I find the plans really a bit sketchy and managerialist, but they are closer to being in the right direction than Attwood's.
2) Patsy McGlone has some much more specific ideas about rebuilding the party through cooperation between leadership and membership. He wants each candidate to have endorsements from two non-party groups, which may not be implementable but would be interesting to try. He aims to have a functioning branch in every District Electoral Area, which I think is unrealistic but not a bad aspiration. I liked his proposals on this when I first read them; although they could be more coherent (and should have been better proof-read) they are a good set of ideas for party reformers to work with.
1) I had not expected to come to this conclusion, but Alasdair McDonnell has by far the best set of proposals on rebuilding the party. In a six-page leaflet with the title "Decline Stops Now", he starts at the top by promising to appoint a collective leadership with clearly defined roles, and then goes on to describe a "battle ready SDLP". If I were voting, he would have secured my support with the last two sentences of this section, "Where we have no current MLA or councillor there will always be a clearly designated and supported SDLP representative with recognised party status. As a top priority this will be implemented in the four Antrim constituencies, Fermanagh-South Tyrone and Strangford." This seems to me more realistic than McGlone's aspiration for a functioning branch in every DEA. He tells the truth about the state of activism in the party: "There is a handful of active branches, usually built around a successful representative, others which are being valiantly carried by a few hard-working individuals, and many which hardly ever meet." And he promises a special conference on party organisation, as well as further thoughts on membership structures and fund-raising. I also like his line that "we should socialise together more". McDonnell gets it right on tone, analysis, and ways and means of finding a solution.
SDLP delegates will of course be taking at least two other considerations into account as they cast their votes – the resonance of each candidate's political vision with their own, and the personal chamistry of each candidate. I am not well placed to judge on either of those questions. But the question of fixing the party's structures is, operationally, the most important problem for the SDLP today, and based on what I have seen from the candidates themselves, Alasdair McDonnell has the best ideas of how to do that.
The Beards of George McClellan, Horatio Seymour and Horace Greeley: a correction and retraction
Nine years ago today, I set up a web-page on my site describing the history of facial hair in US Presidential elections. On that page I stated that Horatio Seymour, the unsuccessful Democratic candidate in the 1868 election, "sported only modest sideburns" and that Horace Greeley, the unsuccessful Democratic candidate in the 1872 election, "had only sideburns (his high collar looks a bit like a beard but this is an illusion)." I also stated that there had never been a Presidential election where more than one candidate had had a "proper" beard.
A former Commissioner of the New York City Department of Records has contacted me to point out that in fact Greeley "sported one of those whacky neck beards". On examining the portraits of him available on the Internet today (which are probably several orders of magnitude more numerous than the ones I could find in 2002), I see that my correspondent is entirely correct. What I had thought was a ruff or scarf is in fact the man's facial hair, his cheeks and chin shaved but his sideburns extending to meet in front of his neck.
Having realised that the former Commissioner was right and I was wrong, I looked again at the other Democratic candidate beaten by Grant, Horatio Seymour, who lost the 1868 election, and realised that he too had sported a similar arrangement"
I then went back another election and realised that once again the Democratic candidate was more bearded than I had thought. I had been blinded by George McClellen's luxuriant moustache; in fact he did also sport a wee tuft of hair on the front of his chin. It is really clear from this 1862 photograph of him with Lincoln, two years before they stood against each other:
I feel that my statement that there has never yet been an election where more than one candidate had a proper beard remains valid – but only because McClellan's, Seymour's and Greeley's beards are not really proper beards. So I shall have to rephrase that section as well. (And the page could do with a more comprehensive update some time.)
For info – candidates with proper beards won elections in 1864, 1868, 1872, 1876, 1880, and 1888 but lost in 1856, 1884, 1892 and 1916. (Abraham Lincoln was clean-shaven at the time of the 1860 election and grew his beard only later.) Both major candidates in 1904 had moustaches; otherwise the moustached won in 1884, 1892 and 1908, but lost to the bearded in 1880 and 1888, and to the clean-shaven in 1912 (twice), 1944 and 1948. You really needed to know that, eh?