Whoops! Labour airbrush out the European elections...

I've just had a Labour leaflet through my letterbox. This doesn't happen very often, so it's a bit of an occasion. However, today's leaflet was particularly amusing.

According to Lambeth Labour Party, "The last time local people voted was May 2008 - and the Lib Dems came THIRD!"

So when I went down to the polling station on June 4th, that was all a dream, was it? That meter-long piece of paper with lots of candidates' names on it - that was at an origami stall? Lambeth Town Hall played host to a convention of people who just really like pretending to count ballot papers?

I know the Labour Party weren't exactly keen to take part in the European elections, but surely airbrushing a WHOLE election campaign from history takes the biscuit. To make it even funnier, they've alleged that "Lib Dems are using old results from many years ago in a desperate bid to convince voters"...

Interestingly enough, the results of the Euro elections in Lambeth show a different story to the one Labour wants to tell. In the Euro elections in Lambeth, Labour came first, Lib Dems came second, Conservatives third, and Greens fourth. The same as happened in the 2006 Council elections and in the 2005 General Election. Perhaps Labour are just a bit keen to pretend the Lib Dems aren't a threat?

Labour's leaflet also dwells on the sins of "taxaholic Lib Dems" and "Greedy Lib Dem councillors" who have "stitched up a deal to hike up their allowances". I only mention this because the leaflet is promoting the Labour candidate for Streatham, Chuka Umunna. I follow Chuka on Twitter (@ChukaUmunna) and I was very impressed when I read this tweet from him:

"been out and about in Tulse Hill - big sentiment out there for doing politics differently and against negative campaigning"

Evidently that doesn't apply to Chuka's own election literature. A shame - but maybe predictable.

Shaggy Canvassing Tales meme

Prompted by this post on Lib Dem Voice the time has come for me to unburden myself of my own Shaggy Canvassing Stories.

I really enjoy canvassing and think it's vital. There's only one way you can find out what people think, which is to ask them. And since 95% of people never go anywhere near a Residents Association, a tenants meeting or their Safer Neighbourhoods Panel there is only one way to actaully talk to them.

But it does involve some classic tales. Let's start with the stories which actually, erm, involve shagging. Like the occasion when I was knocking on the door of a household which, from the names on the sheet, seemed to be four young women house-sharing. After a short while, the door was answered by a man. I started saying "Hello, I'm Chris, I'm from the Liberal Democrat party...." - but at that stage I realised he was wearing a leopard-print dressing gown, and apparently, nothing else. "I'm a bit busy at the moment" he said. I thought the better of inquiring whether any of Pheobe, Nicole, Claire or Bryony happened to be at home at the time and departed, a bit sheepishly.

The phrase about never working with kids or animals is as true about canvassing as it is anything else. I remember the time when the door was answered by a boy of about 5. I asked whether Mr or Mrs Smith was at home (which, in the likely event the parents are overhearing, is rather more useful than saying "Is Mummy or Daddy there?"). The small boy departed. After about 30 seconds, Mr Smith bounded up to the door, carrying his son, shouting "I'll vote for you if you get rid of this one for me!".

I don't have anything interesting to say about dogs, except that they're helpful if the doorbell doesn't work. Cats, however, can be a subject of conversation. There was one house outside which I'd noticed an absolutely gorgeous ginger cat while delivering leaflets in the morning. Come the evening, I went to canvass that street, and was bowled over to find that there were not one but two of them. Their owner didn't have a clue how he was going to vote but hopefully my gushing admiration established the Liberal Democrats as the Cat Loving Party.

An animal also turned out to be involved in the occasion which wins my personal Most Bemused Canvasser award. I was knocking on some doors in Cambridge, many moons ago, and noticed a strange-looking rock in the garden of one house. I knocked on the door, had the usual conversation, but as his parting shot the voter said "Make sure you shut the gate on your way out, otherwise the tortoise will escape". Surely enough I saw the strange-looking rock plodding towards freedom...

Lambeth Council ALMOs - how bad?

Some bad news for lots of people in Lambeth. The 'Lurking about SE11' blog has a some very interesting information. A leaked investigation into Lambeth's social housing seems to have come up with some very worrying conclusions.

That blog says...

• Lambeth's social housing complaints system has broken down


• Collection of rents and service charges is poor


• There's a high proportion of residences without Gas Safety Certificates

It is very concerning stuff. As SE11 points out the gas safety problem sounds particularly serious - indeed, dangerous. But the other two aren't exactly trivial either. If Lambeth Living are doing badly on collecting rents and service charge, then that's unfair on everyone who does pay their bills. Is that a factor behind the 17% rent rises that have recently been imposed on tenants?

I'll reserve judgement until I've seen a copy of the full report, which hopefully is going to be published.

This is all a reminder to me that politics is a serious business. No matter how much clowning about happens in Parliament and the media (and I'm genuinely angry about this week's clowning), the decisions politicians take affect peoples' lives....

Moldovan revolution: Twitter ye not

Imagine you were on a protest march, and the only thing the media seemed to be interested in was what kind of phone you had and what colour your placards were, and didn't care what you were protesting about... Would be a bit irritating, wouldn't it?

That's how many Moldovans must be feeling at the moment. They're trying to overturn some corrupt election results, and sack the Communist President of their country. But all the world's media can talk about is Twitter!

Here are a selection of reactions to the CNN and New York Times coverage of the Moldovan protests (probably following the Telegraph). Ironically, of course, all these comments are Tweets.

nytimes should approach an objective approach to news reporting! all they have is just about twitter n nothing bout protest

Western media don't understand #pman isn't about Twitter. #pman is about anti-communist protest in Chisinau, Moldova to demand re-elections.

The romantisation of the Moldovan anti-communist revolts is sad. People are paying with blood for their freedom. Its not about Twitter

The protestors have been using every form of social networking, including boring things like Yahoo! messenger, Facebook and good old-fashioned SMS. One blogger seems to have concluded that the proliferation of web-based communication means that the protests are funded by the USA.... judge the sense of that for yourself!

The authorities' response has been equally cyber-savvy. Moldtelecom, the main (largely stat-owned) telecoms provider, appeared to block access to Facebook (and its Russian equivalent, VKontakte). Two of the principal independent news sites, unimedia.md and jurnaltv.md, also seemed to encounter serious server problems when they began to cover the protests; but unimedia.info, hosted outside of Moldova, seems to be doing fine...

However interesting the technological angle is, don't forget that this is a serious protest about a serious issue. Emma Nicholson has criticed the 'overly warm' report of the OSCE election observers (she was one) and says she is sure there was serious fraud. Even the Economist thinks the Moldovan elections were dodgy. The Moldovan protestors are justifiably angry. "Looks like a democracy" isn't good enough for them - and it shouldn't be good enough for the West either.

The revolution will be run on McDonalds free Wifi!

So are these Moldovan protests a twitter revolution or not? The Telegraph certainly seemed to think so. ( More info about the demonstrations & background here

There's another good post here which backs up what people have been sying about the relative unimportance of it. Since there was no mobile reception in central Chisinau, people were using the GPRS on their phones rather than normal SMS... (While it's the poorest nation in Europe, Moldova does seem to have a fair number of Blackberries!)

An interesting comment on that post:

Twitter was not used to manage manifest. Also cellphones works bad only few hundred meters. Also near was McDonnalds with free wifi.

I think everyone these days expects that the revolution will not be televised (indeed, Moldovan national TV has been showing a lot of documentaries about squirrels recently). But I don't think anyone was expecting free WiFi from McDonalds to play an important role!

EDIT: If you're involved in the protests, please let me know your take on this in the comments.

More on the Moldovan Protests

A protestor's view of the protests in Moldova. There is still a lot of information on Twitter: hashtag #pman. Apparently there were few protestors first thing this morning, but more have begun to turn up now it's lunchtime in Moldova. Sounds like a student demonstration to me...

Moldova - Revolution or what?

The news is slowly starting to pick up the fact that there is a near-revolution going on in Moldova, where there have been massive protests by students over the past two days. I gather that firefighters are tackling the Parliament building and the Presidency building in the Moldovan capital Chisinau both of which have suffered much internal damage from fire.

The trigger for the demonstrations was the apparent victory of the Communists in the parliamentary elections on Sunday. The OSCE said that the Modovan elections "met many international standards but further improvements are necessary", suggesting they weren't intolerably corrupt, the protestors don't seem to buy that. I also had a Facebook message from Danish pro-democracy organisation SILBA earlier on saying "The election was to a large extend filled with fraud". An objective of the protestors is a recount of the votes or a fresh election.

(see below for more on the origins ofthe protests) A number of people, including The Telegraph and Mark Pack, have commented on the use of Twitter by the protestors. I'm not sure exactly how important this has been - chatting to one of the demonstrators on MSN, he said that the more aggressive demonstrators weren't the kind to be using Twitter to coordinate things! It's certainly been possible to follow the demonstrations on Twitter (hastag #pman )much more easily than through the media. This has been rather irritating a Londoner called Peter who knows nothing about Moldova but whose Twitter name is @pman...

The protests look set to continue tomorrow, with much talk about seizing the state TV station, which apparently has been showing documentaries about squirrels all day.
Moldovan president Vladimir Voronin is basically saying the whole thing is an attempted coup by the opposition parties. Until now there has been no sign of the Moldovan military, let us pray that continues to be the case. Nevertheless I'm told Moldovan media are reporting 200 people wounded in the demonstrations including a small number of deaths.

A good site for pictures and more news: http://unimedia.info/

UPDATE: More info on the genesis of these demos. At about 4pm (Moldovan time!) on Monday, Vlad Filat the leader of Partidului Liberal Democrat din Moldova called for peaceful protests against the elections. At the same time an NGO called curaj.net was organising a flashmob-style protest in the city centre with any young people who wanted to protest against the conduct of the elections asked to bring a candle. I'm told that when these protests occurred they took off and some people tried to enter the Parliament building, but were persuaded not to by Vlad Filat. Then when more people arrived this morning, nothing could control the crowd...