ElectionLeaflets.org

A friend who is an avid reader of The Daily Mail tipped me off with: LibDems forced to apologise after campaign leaflet described rival as ‘greasy haired twat’:

…Today Ms Pascoe’s office was forced to apologise over the offensive material as the pair battle to win the seat of Camborne South on Cornwall Council.

The leaflet read: ‘[Anna] has always campaigned on behalf of the people she represents – rather than using her position as a personal platform (like greasy-haired twat Stuart Cullimore)’.

Around 40 of the promotional flyers were printed and distributed to homes around Camborne, shocking local residents.

Joe Taylor, LibDem spokesman for the area, apologised and said it was not an authorised leaflet but ’some kind of prank that’s back-fired’.

He claims the blunder may have even been the result political sabotage – with a rival gaining access to a Lib-Dem computer.

The story appears under the byline “Daily Mail Reporter” dated 9:28pm, 1 June 2009 using the more polite “t***” instead of “twat”.

The Daily Telegraph has the same story timed at 6:24pm using the even more sensitive “****”.

ThisIsTheWestCountry prints the story at 6:43pm and is able to use the word “twat”.

But it seems it was the BBC which broke the story at 1:18pm and was able to reproduce the full phrase “greasy-haired twat” with a snapshot image of the leaflet, that is unfortunately too small to make out the words.

Tory blogger Chris Hawes caught this story at 5:52pm and reported it under the title Why you should always proof read election literature in which he opines:

Unfortunately, this leaflet hasn’t been uploaded to The Straight Choice so we can’t read the whole thing.

Of course, the Lib Dems are denying that they printed or endorsed the leaflet containing the expletive (they would though, wouldn’t they?). In the end, there are just two options: either it was a monumental fuck-up, or a set-up. Which is the truth however…

But at least it does show one thing – people are actually reading political leaflets put through their letter box!

Now, an apology has been given, and accepted, and the episode quite possibly gifted Stuart Cullimore and his delightfully local party Mebyon Kernow the election (we’ll find out by the end of this week). There’s no question that this was a tragic error.

Election leaflets in local areas are usually produced by amateurs who are not used to the demands of producing lots of copy and haven’t learnt about the pitfalls. It’s why professional publications always have editors and copy-editors and fact-checkers and rigorous quality-control stuff like that.

Without all this expense, there will be howlers, and most professional publications with mass circulations cannot afford the damage to their reputation.

With printed material, you need to check and double-check, and get someone else to check it in order to cleanse it everything that shouldn’t be there. The job has to be taken seriously — that’s the trick. A professional editor knows exactly how fallible writers can be, and doesn’t cut corners no matter how tempting it is.

As we get more and more local leaflets uploaded, these sorts of mistakes are going to be fun and interesting to uncover and share, but we shouldn’t take them too seriously. It is the measured allegations that have obviously been worked through several written drafts in order to get the right nuance that will be a better measure of intent and character.

Update: The results were: Stuart Cullimore (Mebyon Kernow) 391 votes, John Herd (Conservative) 371, Anna Pascoe (Liberal Democrat) 291 votes, John Woodward (Independent) 243 votes, Jacqueline Harding (Labour) 83 votes.

You don’t have to go very far down the list of uploaded leaflets to find something notable.

I wish people were happy with putting their names and emails in public on a website so I could thank the guy (or gal) in Malvern who uploaded this leaflet with the comment:

The graph showing the last results in West Worcs is the wrong way around – actually the Conservatives got 45% and the Lib Dems 39%.

with added tags “misrepresentation” and “fraud”.

What a hero.

He (or she) is correct — according to Wikipedia and other less well-presented sources such as The Guardian.

My only quibble is they’ve uploaded only one side of the leaflet, so I can’t allege that this is similar to the case of voters being urged to vote tactically in the proportional representation Euro election as though it were a first-past-the-post Parliamentary election. But the timing is suspicious.

To be fair, the picture is captioned:

Liz Lynne campaigning with Richard Burt

Liz Lynne, whose website is here, is an MEP standing for re-election in 3 days time for the West Midlands region, while Richard Burt, whose websites are here and here (with the 2005 election bar chart the right way round), is the Liberal Democrat Parliamentary Candidate for West Worcestershire.

You could argue that the inclusion of both of them makes the leaflet ambiguous, but it doesn’t really work like that. The idea that you’re distributing leaflets that helpfully tells people how to make their votes count in an election expected to be in 2010 just three days before an election in 2009 where such information does not apply is silly. Someone needs to call them out on this.

The actual result in the last EU elections in 2004 put the LibDems at 13.7% behind UKIP at 17.5%, which meant that Liz Lynne got allocated the 7th and last seat.

This year, according to the changes, the West Midlands is allocated only 6 seats. This means that she has to beat UKIP in terms of percentage, or she’s toast. Labour in fact got 23.4% in the 2004 European election and won 2 seats.

I don’t have time to crunch the numbers regarding the D’Hondt method of seat allocation to determin whether it’s a sane tactic to go after Labour votes and pretend that UKIP doesn’t exist (unless it says something on the other side of the leaflet), because it’s complicated.

Here is a short anti-BNP video which explains how the seat allocation happens. According to Peter Cranie (the Green MEP candidate mentioned) whom I saw on his battle bus today (I am a Green Party member, I have to declare), it’s probably out of date due to a late UKIP surge in the polls.

It’s a good video all the same.

No one really knows what’s going to happen and what tactics to use. Not enough people are used to playing this game enough times.

Probably the best advice is to vote for the party you want to get elected.

Which is how it should be.