ElectionLeaflets.org

How dirty was the Election Ground War?

By The Straight Choice
Updated 30th April 2010

PRESS EVENT LIVERPOOL: Tuesday 4th May 2010 @ 12 noon

The Liverpool John Moores University’s Art and Design Academy for Reception

• Revealing which party ran the dirtiest election leaflet of the 2010 campaign – and who ran the best
• The results of a three-day open and public online judging competition for the best and worst at thestraightchoice.org
• American Indians, Paedophiles, Margaret Thatcher and more: the strange side of the 2010 elections.

Over the last few months, hundreds of volunteers have been collecting the debris of the election battle. They’ve painstakingly scanned and uploaded over 4000 election leaflets from all parties and all regions to www.thestraightchoice.org.

These leaflets are silent witnesses to the real fight over how we will be ruled. Not party leader debates, but deceitful bar charts. Not prime time TV broadcasts, but personal attacks on other candidates.

The Straight Choice will present a detailed analysis and a dissection of the tides of the four-week long war.

• Which constituency was carpet-bombed with leaflets, and where was there a tactical withdrawal?
• Whose picture was mysteriously missing from his own party’s leaflets?
• Theatres of war — immigration, pensions, free bus passes
• Clegg, Cameron and Brown in a mosaic of leaflets as big as the room (available in high resolution for distribution)
• Prizes for finest and most despicable leaflets

Julian Todd – Senior Civil Hacker says “These spent shells of the campaign were never meant to be seen online. We’ve left our cameras running, and on
Tuesday we can show the newsreel of the ground war.”

How the leaflets are being judged?

Political enthusiasts are being encouraged to test the political leaflets from all major parties. Users will mark the leaflets on positivity, quality, concentration on local issues – and whether or not the leaflets tell fibs and with a league table showing the results. You can join in online here.

Election Leaflet Analysis

About The Straight Choice – #thesc #ge10

The Straight Choice is a real-time election leaflet project founded in 2008. It presents a live visualization of the flood of party political leaflets as they are delivered across the country during an election campaign.

The name of the website is derived from a leaflet in the controversial by-election in Bermondsey in 1983 which has become the type specimen of accusations of dodgy campaigning. The project was founded by Richard Pope and Julian Todd, and is entirely run by volunteers.

For interview, comment or more info contact Aine McGuire on 07710 377929. To book a place at the event email: team@thestraightchoice.org

Twitter: @thesc

(Sponsored by ScraperWiki.com)

COMMITTEE ON STANDARDS IN PUBLIC LIFE

Committee on standards in public life Michael Crick

My attention has been drawn to Michael Crick’s Written Evidence to the Eleventh Inquiry by the Committee on Standards in Public Life dated 13 April 2006:

I understand you are undertaking a review of the work of the Electoral Commission, to see how it might develop in future. Please can I make a small suggestion?

How about getting the EC to set up a library of election literature? I suggest this should involve amending the law to oblige all candidates and partiels to submit one (or more?) copies of everything they publish to the EC’s new library. I recommend that this should not just include traditional election addresses and leaflets, but also copies of all modern campaign publications – the DVDs and videos which parties often issue to voters these days; all pages on websites promoting canidates and parties; copies of posters which parties erect on public billboards; newspaper ads; and the set scripts which party phone banks use in telephone canvassing. Such a national and public collection would have a number of advantages.

First, it woudl make it much easir for the EC itself, as well as parties, candidates, the media and the general public, to monitor how much activity is going on in each constituency and nationally, and whether parties really are sticking to the rules, particularly those on spending limits. As you may know from contact I had with your committee in Lord Nolan’s time, I believe spending limits have been grossly abused in the past.

Second, I believe it would keep a small check on standards of behaviour by political candidates. For example, constituency campaigns often issue leaflets which masquerade as being published by an opposing party — one example occured in Chris Huhne’s campaign in Eastleigh in 2005, and I am told there have been others, and not just by Lib Dem candidates. I suspect that politicians would be slightly less willing to get up to such tricks if they knew such publications would be on permanent record in the EC library, available for public inspection in perpetuity.

Third, such a libraru would be of huge historic and academic interest, building up a valuable achive of elections in this country, providing an election-by-election tapestry of the issues, candidates and techniques of each campaign. It would be valuable addition to the nation’s heritage.

The new system could be viewed as being in the spirit with the new Freedom of Information obligations on government bodies, only FOIA does not currently apply to political parties.

In a way, the obligation I propose on candidates and parties to submit their material would be similar to the copyright law, whereby any publisher of a new book is obliged to submit one copy of the book to each of the six copyright libraries in the British Isels. Indeed, for all I know, the copyright law may even extend to election literature, though I doubt whether many parties do actually submit their leaflets to the British Library and other copyright libraries.

At the moment there are several academic libraries which collect election literature — the LSA, Bristol University and Brunel University — and a lot of local history libraries collect such material from their localities. But these collections are inevitably patchy and incomplete, especially since parties are under no obligation to respond to such academic requests.

I don’t believe that storing such material need be very expensive for the EC; collecting and keeping it could probably be handled by one person. It would probably involve about 15,000 pieces of paper per election — on a very rough guess of four leaflets per candidate. Indeed, the EC might want to team up with a university for long-term storage.

I think it would be asking too much of the EC to collect literature from local government elections, but it might be possible to apply the same rules to parties and candidates in local government, and make local authorities the collecting bodies, through their local history libraries or local archives.

It’s just a thought, which would fit quite neatly with the EC’s other work. I would be happy to come and discuss it further if you so wish.

Here it is, thoughts?

During the leadership debate on Sky News last night David Cameron accused The Labour Party of sending out scaremongering leaflets that said that a Conservative Government would scrap free bus passes and eye-tests for older people.

Gordon Brown denied authorising such leaflets, and a subsequent Labour press release repeated this. Labour have also argued that this is legitimate territory since commitments are absent form the Conservative manifesto.

The manifesto issue will no doubt become the fulcrum of the debate in the press, but in the mean-time what do we really know about the leaflets in question?

We certainly know that Labour Candidates have been mentioning the fact that Labour introduced or have a commitment to free bus travel and / or eye-tests (but without an explicit statement that a Conservative Government would remove these) in their own local leaflets here, here, here, here and here.

This makes sense, since you assume that these candidates are proud of these achievements, and fits with the Labour strategy of championing their domestic achievements.

We also know that in Scotland a leaflet from Gordon Brown’s own constituency claims that free bus travel is under threat from the SNP. So it is fair to say that the threat of cuts to bus-passes is a live part of the Labour campaign against the SNP, and would hope that Gordon Brown knew about this since it was on his own leaflets.

But what about other local Labour leaflets attacking the Conservative for a threatening to cut these services?

We don’t appear to have any in the 2,200 + leaflets that we have. There are however, according to photographs published on Twitter by Conservative campaign member of staff Henry Macrory, other local leaflets mentioning eye-tests and / or free bus travel, but in some cases alongside explicit statements that they were at risk or would be scrapped Conservative Government.

So far so good, but this doesn’t sound like a national campaign against the Conservatives authorised by Gordon Brown. There are though two other pieces of evidence that are possibly national in their nature.

Firstly there is a leaflet published by the shop workers union USDAW which does state that Winter Fuel Allowance and free bus travel are under threat from a Conservative Government. We only have the front page of this leaflet, but it looks like it could be something that was distributed nationally to USDAW members. Would Gordon Brown have taken part in the drafting of a leaflet by a Trade Union for distribution to it’s members though? Probably not.

The final thing we have is a bit more convincing though. Again it comes from the Conservative Staffer Henry Macrory on Twitter, and it appears to be a postcard aimed at older people. This is a very similar design to other national campaign postcards from the Labour Party during the campaign so far, for example here and here so we can pretty safely assume it’s genuine.

(We don’t have a copy of this leaflet and would really like to get a full copy (both sides) of it. Please help us seek one out and add it to the site.)

It’s worth noting the language on this leaflet. It’s certainly not as explicitly as originally suggested by David Cameron, but it does get the message over pretty clearly. Assuming we can verify that this leaflet is a national campaign then you would think that Gordon Brown should have known about it.

So, assuming we can independently verify this last leaflet, it is probably fair to say that Labour are campaigning nationally on the issue of a non-explicit Conservative threat to bus-passes, but that we have no evidence of a similar campaign over the issue of eye-tests. In addition to this, local leaflets are mentioning the issues in various forms. We’ll leave other to argue over the rights and wrongs of all this.

But what of the Conservatives said about these issues? Well, we know it’s missing from their manifesto, but we do have a leaflet, in letter form and ’signed’ by David Cameron, pledging that the Conservatives will:

- Protect the Winter Fuel Payment
- Protect the free bus pass
- Protect the pension credit

Is ‘protect’ the same as ‘not cut’? Either way this looks like it goes someway to counteract the Labour claims.

It’s worth noting however that it also includes a statement that Labour are considering a “death tax” which they have since rules out. So it also turns the other accusation made at Labour, that it was using campaign material to scare older people about the outlook post May 6th, back on the Conservatives. So score-draw?

What luck! I was able to catch this evening’s Episode 2 of the Vote Now Show with Steve Punt and Hugh Dennis, in which John FinnemoreElection Leaflets.

The great thing was I was able to get to look up almost every leaflet he referred to on TheStraightChoice as he did his routine. What are the odds of that?

For your convenience, here is the run down in order:

Newcastle upon Tyne Central with the Neutral Newcastle News

Ochil and South Perthshire Banks Account

Brighton Pavilion Don’t back a loser horse race

Edinburgh South horse wearing stethoscope

[Doh! I can't find the David Rowntree boring leaflet on this page. I wonder if Mr. Finnemore lives in that constituency and hasn't bothered to scan and upload it yet!]

Derby North We have pledged to run a positive campaign, unlike some parties. For instance, the Lib Dems are being less than honest.

York Outer The Tory candidate is an unknown ex-councilor from Harrogate.

Selby and Ainsty Daren isn’t afraid of getting dirty.

Paisley and Renfrewshire South I’ve shoveled excrement in five continents.

Great show. Glad we could be of assistance. Now could we please have that last Cities of London and Westminster leaflet uploaded to this site ASAP? I know it’s tedious chore, but we all have to do our bit, you know.

Update: have discovered a poor quality single side of missing leaflet here. Better than nothing, I suppose.

Oh dear, blogging seems to have fallen behind the curve quite radically. It seems everything is happening live on the twitter feeds at a frightening fast rate. I don’t even think I could keep up with it, even with link dumps like this:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/blog/2010/apr/06/straight-choice-election-leaflets
http://www.guardian.co.uk/cardiff/2010/apr/06/cardiff-constituency-general-election-2010
http://www.guardian.co.uk/leeds/2010/apr/06/general-election-kicks-off-in-leeds
http://www.insidehousing.co.uk/StoryBlog.aspx?storycode=6509296
http://www.journalism.co.uk/2/articles/538108.php
http://www.metro.co.uk/news/819909-ukip-can-t-spell-their-own-name
http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/thereporters/rorycellanjones/2010/04/informative_political_sites.html

As my beat is mostly in Merseyside, I’ll move my coming blog posts to my personal freesteel blog. These will include what’s going down over in Liverpool Wavertree.

We’re looking for correspondents in other areas to watch and report on interesting stuff in local leaflets. Please put them in the twitter feed or email the team. Don’t hesitate. Get the stories out fast. This is the time that matters. Only the votes count.