ElectionLeaflets.org

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?

The buying up of Google Adwords is fast becoming the new version of, or at least comparable to,  posting election leaflets though peoples doors. This, for example,was the search results page for ‘Vince Cable’ just after the ‘Ask The Chancellor’ debates on Channel 4 this evening:

As you can see the Conservatives are buying up Adwords for the Lib Dem Shadow Chancellor. Nothing wrong with that, but what else is being brought and by by whom? Who’s spending what? Are there any really specific words that parties are buying up that only small numbers of people will ever think to search for but will convey niche messages?

Currently we have no way of knowing, but here’s an idea of how we could monitor it:

1) Write a script that grabs the days hot topic terms from various web pages. These might include:

• headlines or term extraction the press release pages of the main party webpages
• headlines or term extraction from bbc news politics front page
• term extraction from the Wikipedia page about the 2010 election
• names of PPCs from YourNextMP.com
• constituency names form TheyWorkForYou.com
• the YouGov leaderboard

run the script once or twice a day and add any new terms you find into a database table.

2) Write a script to do a google search once or twice a day using all the terms in the database and if there are any adwords on the results page that link to a (major) party website store them in a second database table.

If you fancy having a go at this please get in touch! It can be in any language you like and we can work out how to integrate it into The Straight Choice later.

Apparently still unable to find anyone both photogenic enough and willing to back the policies on their election leaflets, the British National party have again resorted to using stock imagery for their latest mail-shot. For your consideration we present you with this BNP leaflet uploaded to The Straight Choice earlier today:

… and this image from stock photography website Fotolia:

As you may remember, this isn’t the first time the party have pulled this one. Back in May last year Stephen Paulger and Tim Ireland reported that the BNP  had made use of stock imagery in their Euro election leaflets. After a bit of extra digging, the Telegraph then tracked down the photographer and son of the Italian pensioners featured in the leaflet and found him distinctly non-plussed at being featured in a political leaflet.

As the Telegraph went on to point out, this is at best legally dubious, and probably illegal. Back in June The Straight Choice actually tried to contact the police regarding the original leaflet and find out if it was being investigated, but after being bounced around 3 different departments (and one local cop shop) we had to give up and admit the police didn’t know who would look into it if there was even a problem. Maybe it’s worth another go tomorrow?

PS, does anyone recognise the police woman on the first page? I’m sure she used to be on some kind of low rent version of The Bill but the internet is failing me.

Well done to Chloe Smith for winning the Norwich North by-election, who will now be entering the House of Commons. Here’s a few of her best bits form the campaign:

To see how she lives up to these promises, you can follow her voting record on The Public Whip, and track what she says in Parliament at TheyWorkForYou.com.

All these graphs have been published by  parties contending the the Norwich North by-election (click for a bigger version):

That makes things clearer no?

We are paying another visit to Norwich on Monday to promote the StraightChoice.org and capture the most recent leaflets. The who thing will be being filmed by the BBC, but we need volunteers to help out,  If you are free to help out please get in touch at team@thestraightchoice.org.

You’d have thought that, having been triggered by the expenses row, the Norwich North by-election would have been fertile ground for independents. And, there are indeed 3 of them in the running. But little coverage weirdly.

Anyway, we’ve only had a leaflet, by Bill Holden (who cleverly snagged the domain norwichnorth.com):

Bill Holden

But whilst we were in Norwich the other day we did spot various posters tied to Lamp postsfor Craig Murray:

Craig Murray

He’s actually quite an interesting chap. If you’re wondering where you’ve heard the name before, he was in the news a couple of years back for being defrocked as the UK’s ambassador to Uzbekistan. Form Wikipedia:

While at the embassy in Tashkent, he accused the Karimov administration of human rights abuses, a step which, he argued, was against the wishes of the British government and the reason for his removal. Murray complained to the Foreign and Commonwealth Office in November 2002, January or early February 2003, and in June 2004 that intelligence linking the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan to al-Qaeda, suspected of being gained through torture, was unreliable, immoral, and illegal. He described this as “selling our souls for dross”.

That as it may, someone should probably point out to him that fly-posting is illegal though.

Some interesting stuff on the Conservative’s campaign pledge over at Norfolk blogger here and here.

News from our little trip to Norwich coming soon.

We’ve made a little leaflet of our own to promote The Straight Choice during the Norwich by-election.

If you live in Norwich and fancy printing a few out and handing them out, the PDF version is here.

A few of us will be in Norwich on Sunday doing a bit of promotion, send us an email if you fancy helping out.