The Straight Choice

We know there are such things as shell companies that are fielded like sockpuppets across the corporate financial landscape in a way that our legal infrastructure is incapable of dealing with.

But is there such a thing as a shell party?

The leaflet on the left has popped up in two places in the UK. It caught my eye because I have seen lots of Libertas.eu election posters here on my holiday in Ireland, and had generally ignored it as some sort of incomprehensible local politics I didn’t need to know anything about.

Here’s what their leaflet explains:

* No to the anti-democratic Lisbon Treaty
* New Treaty: A short, clear statement of what the EU does
* We demand a referendum on this new, understandable treaty

The Libertas Institute was a lobby group that was founded in 2006 by the Irish businessman Declan Ganley (a man now integrated into the US military-industrial complex) which successfully busted the Irish vote on the Treaty of Lisbon in 2008 and effectively sank the whole enterprise.

There are some interesting allegations connecting this lobby group to certain strategic interests in the US that may favour a conveniently weak European Union. It appeals to conspiracy theorists like me who see little evidence that democracy in Western Europe is uniquely strong enough to withstand the skilled PR company meddling that has indisputably goes on in other countries where people still turn out to vote. (Note: giving a speech at the Heritage Foundation is one sure way to raise suspicions.)

Nobody really knew what the Lisbon Treaty was about — and Libertas (like most everyone else) made no effort to explain it. But it didn’t matter. It’s too complicated. It goes to show that in our current embodiment of democracy, we can only handle voting for people. You like the look of their face? That’s all you need to know.

Where was I?

Oh, yes. Libertas UK is a brand new party based at: Suite 6.8, 52 Grosvenor Gardens, London, SW1W 0AU with Robin Matthews as Party Leader, Andrew Jamieson as Party Chairman and James Millard as Party Treasurer.

Meanwhile, over at the Electoral Commission, Libertas UK is registered as being founded on 19 December 2008 (initially branded as “New Dawn for Europe”) with the address: 400 Main Road, Westerham Hill, TN16 2HP, with Bridget Rowe as Leader, Mr J.M. Greenbough as Nominating Officer, and Mr Damian Wilson as Treasurer.

Now, I don’t know any of these people from Adam, but they have pulled together an astounding raft of candidates to run in the UK EU election, each with their own individual biographies containing Barnum Effect style paragraphs like:

I’m fighting in this election because I’m really concerned about the bureaucracy filtering from Brussels; this is not the democracy of today’s times regarding red tapes imposed on normal hard working people. It is a shame to hear abuse of tax payers money, as bureaucrats with dream salaries who still need more from tax payers to fulfill their expense claims, where the money should be used to help the people in need instead of useless expenses.

Obviously these people took a great interest in the First European Open Data Summit where Richard Pope and I (and several of our friends) could be found hacking EU obfuscated farm subsidy data — for food. (Hint: the donate button is at the top of the web-page.)

Maybe not.

What do I know?

Not a lot, because the statements of accounts and donations to this party are not going to show up on the database of registers until sometime after the election when all the money — wherever it is from — has had its effect.

Good thinking, that.

Of course, there’s nothing stopping Libertas from declaring all its income on its website ahead of the election so we know where it is coming from.

What do I know?

They’ve got a party constitution (written by Anthony Butcher on 2 March 2009) that merely outlines what meaningless entity appoints what meaningless entity in the party:

Policy Spokesmen

• Policy Spokesmen shall be proposed by the Party Leader, and approved by the Party Scrutiny Committee.
• Policy Spokesmen may be removed at the discretion of the Party Leader, or by removal of approval by the Party Scrutiny Committee.
• Policy Spokesmen shall be assigned specific policy portfolios, and are responsible for policy research, creation and promotion.
• Policy Spokesmen may appoint and dismiss other party members to assist them in their work.

What do I know?

A lot of the Libertas rhetoric seems to involve positioning itself as a pro-Europe version of UKIP — whatever that means.

They want to reform Europe, by being against the Lisbon Treaty whose purpose was, ahem, to reform Europe.

It’s a huge Treaty. There are a lot of good bits of reform in it. Which particular bits of the Treaty didn’t they like?

I haven’t the foggiest.

That still is one hell of a list of candidates. Where did they all come from? Was there some international golf tournament last November where they went round signing people up?

For those who are still puzzled as I am, you can also choose from the newly formed EU election parties No to the EU – Yes to Democracy Party or Jury Team — if you can make any sense of what they stand for either.

One of the reasons I’m not able to blog for this website more actively or help Richard with coding is that I am kayak diving in Ireland and only have the evenings.

This gives me a chance to see how they do electioneering in another country.

In Ireland the parties invest a great deal of money in content free posters depicting a colour portrait of the candidate beside the words “Vote No. 1″ cable-tied to every lamp post as high as ladders can reach.

There were hundreds of them everywhere you looked in Dublin, like Xmas decorations. They thin out slightly in the back of beyond. This is a telegraph pole in Schull.

I don’t know the history of election posters. It turns out that the practice is highly regulated to the extent that they are exempted from the litter laws for 30 days before and 7 days after the election. Outside of this time frame you get fined 150 Euros per poster, which comes out of the election expenses. Before the latest regulations you could put posters up months before the election, but now they go up overnight — probably to bagsie the best spots.

The posters are not paper, they are a sort of corrugated plastic sandwich impregnated with the image on one side to withstand six weeks of Irish weather. The Green Party attempted to use wood, but their 12,000 posters procured at around 10 Euros each started to split.

Some people have tried collecting photos of posters, but I don’t think it’s going to be as fun as scanning election leaflets for TheStraightChoice.org, because they’re all the same and they say nothing. It’s practically impossible to do anything illegal with the content of these posters. Would it be illegal to put the face of someone a lot prettier on your campaign poster? Then everyone votes for the beautiful picture (what other information do they have to go on?), and feels cheated when they see an ugly guy with the same name show up on the night of the election.

Election posters are an arms race. If one party puts them up all over town, then they all have to. I wonder if they should be banned totally in order to free up party resources for different forms of electioneering, such as delivering leaflets that contain hundreds of words intended to convey complex information.

In the UK we don’t have them. There are strict laws against putting up advertisements of any kind on public property, and there are no special exemptions for election material, as there is in Ireland of from the anti-litter laws. The practice is not established. And under Section 109 of the Representation of the People Act 1983 it is illegal to pay for election notices to be put up somewhere unless it is the ordinary business “to exhibit for payment bills and advertisements”. That means that established commercial bill-boards are okay, but you can’t build a load of special ones just for the election.

But one should not take the law too seriously as the source of our traditions. The law is merely the codification of our traditions in such a way as to regulate out the really bad bits.

And in our country, hand-delivered leaflets are the key for winning elections. It’s not web-pages, emails, or facebook groups — if it were, then we would see some form of regulation of them by now.

Maybe in the future someone will work out how to win votes using internet technology, and then law-makers will start to pay attention to it — partly because they would have won their seats by using such tricks, and they’ll understand it, and they’ll want to pull the ladder up after them by banning anyone else from using the same tactics. So far, attempts to harness for force of the internet to political advantage have failed. It’s not clear why.

In the United States they’ve got two further really powerful tools we’ve not got. These are 30 second radio and TV ads, and push-polling which is often done using phone banks and recorded voices.

I don’t know if automated phoning up people with recorded messages (known as robocalling) is illegal in the UK. You can see it would work because people always interrupt what they are doing in order to take a phone call, which means it’s accessing a higher priority communications channel.

If the technique spreads across the Atlantic, then we’re going to need another project to record and archive them, because they have been known to include amazing acts of deception. As usual, those who are not deceived get used to ignoring them, which means their target is self-selecting.

It cannot be stressed enough that election campaigning material matters to us all. It’s not like the dodgy pensions company salesmen, where if you see through their lies and tell them to get stuffed, they’ll go away and rip off your neighbour instead. It’s only years down the line, and when it’s done on a massive enough scale, that you are liable to the cost through your taxes. But most of the time it’s not your problem.

But in an election the problem is yours, because if your neighbours are deceived out of their honest votes, then you have to live with the candidate they selected.

Where was I?

Oh yeah. We have to keep in mind that election campaigns are waged across different media channels, each of which has its own characteristic uses and abuses.

In Britain a primary channel has been for many years the party election leaflet. It’s got a lot of advantages over the other media channels (phone calls, TV ads, posters bearing the candidate’s portrait, or doorstepping), because it is accessible to any political party, and can contain actually relevant information.

Let’s try to take them seriously, and do what we can to make them good.

Read it here.

We have also scored over 200 leaflets now. Maybe we need also to count the people as well as the leaflets, coz 200 leaflets from 5 people is less impressive than if they are from 50.

Apologies for lack of words this week. My valuable blogging time has been taken up with attempting to write an application to a trust which “provides grants for non-charitable, political and campaigning activities”. We’ll see how it goes.

It’s not all grumbling here. I quite like this leaflet by Don Foster MP, which recently showed up in the system

He gives the impression of bouncing around his Bath constituency and being rather keen on it.

You can tell it’s from this year because it’s got that friendly:

Map reproduced from Ordnance Survey data by permission of Ordnance Survey, (C) Crown copyright 2009 All rights reserved

which means that when his expenses are disclosed we can go in and find out whether anything has been paid to the Ordnance Survey for reproduction.

What’s OSM? It’s the free on-line map system made by volunteers — just like you people who have been kind enough to upload your leaflets! — for everyone’s benefit, that we use to pinpoint the location of each leaflet.

We couldn’t do this with Ordnance Survey maps because they require a lot of money even for something as small, non-profit and totally incidental as our election leaflet database — probably to cover their high administrative cost of any sale and use in an on-line window. If it doesn’t make them enough money, it can’t happen.

One thing that’s interesting about this leaflet is it appears to be a campaign leaflet for an MP. You thought there was a Euro-election going on, didn’t you? That’s interesting.

Actually, what captured my attention was the bit about Don taking a government minister down the Combe Down stone mines in 1998. Focus groups show that voters respond to pictures of politicians actually doing things, rather than simply posing in front of a scene like a plant.

I like it because I am a caver who has explored the stone mines in Bath when I was in university.

Hang on…

That bastard is having them filled in!

Maybe I don’t like him so much. I’ll bet those lovely mines were there long before people built houses on them. Just as the rivers were there before the suburbs expanded into the flood plains.

Oh well.

What’s an i-Trip, and what was the problem with them anyway?

The Telegraph article reported in the last blog post didn’t make it into my hard copy of the newspaper, unfortunately.

There was, however, the article BNP could be at heart of far-right EU group which did appear on page 20. I’m guessing that it must have bumped it, because the editor is instinctively not going to want to run two BNP articles on the same day.

Because of the speed with which they are put together, newspaper staff have to over-produce for the space (unless they use the wire-service articles to pad out their space).

This has the side-effect of giving the editor a huge power to filter the news. I can’t find the interview where I read this, but one newspaper reporter explained the consequences. He said that, “No editor doesn’t tell me what to write. But if I wrote stories that he didn’t like, they simply wouldn’t make the cut.”

Luckily, with the internet, there’s no shortage of space, and no excuse to throw perfectly good articles in the trash.

Which brings me to the project called Journalisted.com (hosted on the same server as The Straight Choice) which webscrapes all on-line articles in all the British newspapers and puts them on a database.

Unfortunately, there isn’t the people-power (concerned volunteers anyone) who can go through their favourite daily newspaper and mark up which ones of those on-line articles made it into the print edition, and which have not. This might reverse-engineer some interesting information about the editors picks, perhaps? No one knows.

We do at least get from that site, all other articles written by Matthew Moore.

As you can see, he’s very prolific and has specialities towards sort of internetty things and photography. In those big PR firms they know this sort of stuff and, if you take them a story that’s within such a domain, they can mail it to exactly the right busy reporter who they know will be interested in a package that will be efficient for them to assemble into a story in a small number of minutes.

We didn’t do that. In this case we got very very lucky.

Fame at last!

‘British pensioners’ on BNP election leaflet are actually Italian models

Pamphlets being distributed by the far right party to 29 million homes ahead of next month’s poll European and council polls feature testimonies from five “typical Britons”, giving their reasons for voting BNP.

The endorsements from apparently respectable members of society – including a soldier, doctor, and young mother – reflect the party’s attempt to appeal to mainstream voters.

But far from depicting proud BNP supporters, the images are actually stock photos from online picture libraries that have been used by dozens of websites to promote everything from painkillers to caravans.

On the leaflet, the elderly couple are quoted complaining that hard-working Britons are being “pushed to the back of the queue by bogus asylum seekers”.

But last night Italian photographer Luca Di Filippo confirmed that the people in the photo were actually his parents, who had only ever visited this country as tourists and do not share the views of the BNP.

The disclosure sits uncomfortably with the party’s campaign slogan “British jobs for British workers”.

Mr Di Filippo, who is now based in London, said he was astonished to see images of his mother and father being used to promote an extreme right wing party.

“I did not think they would be allowed to use a royalty-free image for political purposes. I’m really, really upset,” he told The Daily Telegraph.

“If the BNP had been open about what they were doing and asked me directly I would have said ‘no thank you’.”

…

The rest of the article talks about The Straight Choice website and the blogger who uncovered the story, but we know about that half already, so there’s no need to reproduce it.

Meanwhile: There appears to be an issue with uploading leaflets at the moment [from IE on Vista], with the error:

Sorry, your image needs to be in jpeg/jpg format” coming up

Apologies for the inconvenience. This will probably get done on Monday as people are running away for the weekend.

Update: The bug was due to crappy Micro$oft using their totally fictional and non-standard “image/pjpeg” uploaded file setting, as discussed here. As usual, the rest of us have to work around it, as you can see on line 58 of function.fetch.php

Heads up to our second blogger incoming link, pontificating about the flaws in a LibDem leaflet and how it’s inviting people to vote tactically in the Euro-elections (which has proportional representation) as though it’s a Parliamentary election (which has first past the post).

He’s definitely not impressed.

There are between 3 and 10 representatives for each constituency (region of the country)[link] and they are selected according to the D’Hondt method. It looks like a complicated mathematical algorithm, but it comes up with fair answers.

The LibDems have historically been major supporters of PR (proportional representation), because the current system in the UK parliament is so unfair. It’s ironic that they’re willing to cite this unfairness where they’ve ostensibly got what they wanted.

What are we going to do with all these incoming blog posts? I think a rolling set of back-links on the main site and on each leaflet, like I have on the right hand column of undemocracy.com would be great.

But this will take some log-file magic we don’t have time for yet. Please donate at the button at the top so Richard can afford to keep hacking at this and pay his rent!

On the right hand panel are some links to other election leaflet sites, the best of which is http://www.geocities.com/by_elections/index.html.

Here you will see collected leaflets for several by-elections, recent and ancient. By-elections get a special dispensation in law with a spending limit of £100,000 for each party (according to Section 73 of the Representation of the Peoples Act 1983). That adds up to a lot of leaflets, and explains why they can be so much more interesting.

My favourite by-election set of leaflets is Hartlepool 2004.

I could go on endlessly about the leaflets there (and probably will do in subsequent blog posts). But just to give you a taste, check out this letter from the Secretary of State for Health, John Reid, where he writes:

Let me make it clear, as long as I am Secretary of State,
Hartlepool hospital will not be closed

Obviously this is joke to people like us who knew that John Reid was the cabinet minister who tended to get moved to a different difficult department every year (we’d laugh and throw this leaflet in the bin), but to anyone who didn’t know that, this sounds like a hard statement.

A lot of people don’t really follow who is or was the Health Secretary at any time in the past or future. Why should they?

That’s what makes this leaflet perfect. It reads one way to the people to whom it is targeted, and it doesn’t offend those who know it’s silly.

I guess that makes it a sort of a reverse dog-whistle.

A dog-whistle in politics is the use of code-words that are intended to be understood by the target group, but go over the heads of the general population. It’s famously used to appeal to a party’s white racist base (eg “welfare queens”), but could probably be used to appeal to a radical left-wing (if one exists) by use of seemingly innocuous phrases familiar to socialist history when giving a speech about banker’s bonuses.

I haven’t got examples, but I’m sure they’re out there.

But here John Reid gives an example of a phrase which appeals to those who do not correctly interpret its meaning. And that’s masterful.

What about Hartlepool hospital? It closed in 2007.

But the by-election and the subsequent 2005 general election had been won, so there weren’t any political repercussions at the ballot box. And that’s what really matters.

The BNP doesn’t get a lot of friendly media coverage, so one of the only ways they can remind people that they are available to be voted for is through their leaflets.

The thing about leaflets is that they are real political artifacts that merit close study. Just as a bag of household trash, if preserved, could tell an archaeologist a thousand years in the future a huge amount about the way we live today, political leaflets and their delivery patterns can tell you more than anyone knows about the internal workings of the parties.

So, over on the newspeak blog, they’ve been using powerful image recognition software to discover that the pictures of supporters on the latest BNP leaflet are in fact stock photographs.

According to some of the commenters on that blog post, this is normal practice in advertising. But that’s not the point. The point is the story and the perceptions of it. This is politics, after all.

If any of you do try to produce political leaflets yourselves, you’d realize how utterly difficult it is — particularly to get the right pictures. So I completely understand the need to cheat. Which is to say you’re giving away more than you can imagine about yourself and how you did it when you distribute a leaflet.

But, in practice, only a few experts can see the clues.

Luckily, with a website like TheStraightChoice.org, there’s more opportunity for the clever people to study the evidence.

And then they can tell the rest of us what they’ve found through the blogs.

For a real state-of-the-art tour-de-force endlessly hounding leaflet deconstruction, there’s no better place to look than Tim Ireland’s Anne Milton sub-blog.

You don’t need to go that far. Just keep a watch out for anything strange. And keep feeding us those leaflets. Thanks.

Why didn’t anyone think of doing this site five years ago? I have no idea. It’s too obvious to have been missed.

To show you why, here’s some ancient cross-posting from our sadly departed friend Chris Lightfoot that really ought to have woken someone up to need:

4 November, 2003: Have I Got Lies For You

To comment on local political propaganda is pretty futile, but I was much amused by this figure from Anne Campbell Reports, the Labour Party’s local freesheet, showing how Anne’s electoral majority has changed over time:

Ignore for the moment the tragic graphic design and offensive chartjunk for which, no doubt, Microsoft Excel is to blame. Concentrate instead on something which seems, unaccountably, to be missing from this plot. Something quite famous. Something that you might remember. Something that happened in 1997.

Let’s see what a more honest version of the plot would look like:

– spot the difference?

(Obviously presenting the second of the above graphs — showing support plummeting — doesn’t give the right spin for Labour election literature. Presumably the point here is that this edition of Anne Campbell Reports is the first that will be seen by this year’s student intake. They may not know the history of Anne’s promise to vote against top-up fees prior to the 1997 election — a promise which she quickly forgot once the election was won, though oddly one which recurs in her propaganda now the deed is done — and may not realise that her seat is by no means safe. It’s just possible — this is where somebody who cared more would insert some kind of rant about A-levels — that the this year’s new undergraduates aren’t aware that there was an election in 1997, but I’d guess that’s pretty unlikely. All told, this is a pretty clueless piece of propaganda.)

[Chriss then adds some more representative depictions of voting proportions in the blog which you will have to go there to see.]

As usual, like us bloggers, we don’t do real journalism and ask for responses. They come to us, if it turns out that someone actually cares about what was said. So, two years later…

30 April, 2005: Vote Labour!

My long-term readers may recall something I wrote in November 2003 about an eccentric misrepresentation committed by then MP Anne Campbell in her constituency propaganda…

Some time ago one of her other constituents emailed her to ask why she thought this sort of thing acceptable. A copy of her answer came into my possession. I wouldn’t usually publish such correspondence — and I do so here without the permission of either party — but in my view an MP’s opinions of her constituents are a matter of legitimate public interest, as is dishonest propaganda. So here we go: (my comments are interspersed with the text)

[salutation redacted]

The idea that the graphic is misleading is astonishing and could only have been insinuated in the way that it has by a LD supporter which I am sure Chris Witter is.

Note here (a) the slightly surprising confusion of the URL of my web log and my name; (b) the bald, certain and quite wrong claim about my political affiliation. Regarding the latter I am reminded somewhat of a story — recounted, I think, in one of John Simpson’s volumes of autobiography — of Brian Redhead interviewing Nigel Lawson, then Chancellor of the Exchequer, on the Today Programme. In response to some difficult question other Lawson blurted out, “You’re only saying that because you vote Labour.”

Redhead calmly turned off Lawson’s microphone and said, to the listening nation, “We will now have thirty seconds’ silence in which you can reflect upon the enormity of claiming to know how I vote in a secret ballot, and the nation can reflect upon the failure of your economic policies.”

We continue from culumny to irrelevance:

Is he implying that I am somehow ashamed of my 1997 majority and that a large majority in 1997 somehow diminishes a very healthy majority in 2001. If anyone should be trying to hide the 1997 result it is the LDs who did worse in 1997 than they have done for many years.

– and from irrelevance to sophistry, and on to dishonesty:

I did promise to vote against top-up fees in 1997 and I did – immediately after the election when the government legislated to prevent universities from charging top-up or variable fees. I repeated the promise in 2001 and I am saying the same thing now, even though the government appear to have changed their minds. I have been wholly consistent.

I wrote a clarification on this point back in 2003. I had said `top-up fees’ when I meant `tuition fees’. Anne, also, was apparently confused on this point. In 1997 she promised that “Labour will not allow universities to introduce tuition fees”; yet in 1998 she did not vote against the Teaching and Higher Education Act which brought in tuition fees; nor did she even back this rebel amendment which would have satisfied her commitment to a “new system of financial support [i.e., grants] [which would] ensure that students have enough to live on while studying.”

I don’t understand why Parties do this kind of thing except of course, that occasionally people do get taken in by it. I do have a higher opinion of the Cambridge electorate.

Anne Campbell MP for Cambridge

Sure you do…

[The final denouement is here. Chris always had a lively comment threads in blog where people discussed other statistics-gone-wrong in election leaflets delivered to them.]

Man, it would have been cool if we were doing this site back then in 2003 when there was a lot less crud on the internet to compete with and we were young and keen, and Chris could have really got his blood boiling. That would have been a blast! Oh well, we’ll see what we can do with it now.