I’m hoping that this coming week will see two local residents associations get online with powerful internet based self-publishing tools provided by comwifinet. These two groups, one in Stonebridge and one in Mapesbury, will also become part of the Bonnet network of community interest groups, extending the Bonnet network and improving their own effectivness as a result. I’ll be posting links to their websites and to their Bonnet information pages as soon as they are active.

I posted recently on what could be done next with this journal. “wither b.e.c?” i asked. well, new projects are on the horizon. I’ve been working on a community information network project with Colin George, Chair of QPARA and Director of MarketSpark (publisher of the excellent Local Directories for Brent residents associations). We see a need to weave links between associations and organisations active in Brent and an opportunity to develop such a network in the light of the demise of Brent Community Empowerment Network.

MarketSpark and Comwifinet are working together to augment and extend community network links through a varitety of mediums. The Bonnet Project is the working title of our efforts.

Because the Brent Community Empowerment Network is no longer with us, BrAVA have a large stack of cash to put towards a community consultantion project or give back to Brent Council. Perhaps BrAVA will see it to support the Bonnet Project? Who knows…

Visit the website, register yourself and your organisation, participate.

I’ve been reading more F Scott Fitzgerald recently as I’ve just discovered a collection of his short stories published by Hesperus. “The Popular Girl” collects together 5 short stories, each a gem, each of which, with dazzling brilliance and sparkling wit, disects Fitzgerald’s favourite topic: the American society-life. This came to mind this morning while I was digging in my visitor statistics for stats that stood out. The number one incomming search term (the query entered at a search engine that led someone to read this website) is Hayley Matthews. Popular Girl indeed.

Very little information about any of our Councillors on the internet, unless they happened to have been the Mayor or an MP. The Brent Council website lists limited contact information for each elected Council member, and the Brent Brain ‘blogging Councillors’ project had a limited pilot that does not appear to be running at this time. I recently worked with Neil Nerva to support him and the other Labour Councillors in Queen’s Park in the adoption and use on some internet tools: then he wasn’t re-elected so that internet based communications project has ground to a halt.

Hayley is a Brent Lib Dem, so why no information on her, or any of the other Brent Lib Dem councillors on the BELD website? The BELD site emphasises Sarah Teather over other elected members in Brent. With the Lib Dems now with the greatest number of seats in the Council, will we see an overhaul of the BELD website to communicate more from our Local Councillors and less from Sarah Teather? They’ve got www.sarahteather.org.uk for all the news from our MP after all!

I’ve uploaded all the snaps I took at the count to my gallery.

After bumping into one of the Dudden Hill Tory candidates last friday I now have the correct website for the Brent Conservatives. The link has been added to the sidebar. I’ll keep the old link up as it is the link that the official Conservative Party website links to – when they update, so will I.

An update to this post.

I’ve been trying to contact the websites of the Brent East Conservatives and Kwasi Kwarteng. I know they were available during the General Election last year but now they are uncontactable…

and

The film of the Brent East STW hustings is one of a number of films documenting the views of Prospective Parliamentary Candidates on the aggressive action taken against Iraq. The Catch Your MP project aims to hold to account the 412 Members of the 2001-2005 Parliament that voted in support of military action.

Candidates for Brent East: Shahrar, Sarah, Yasmin, Kwasi and George along with Rocky (Wasn’t that a Rainbow cast?) who was standing in Brent South all spoke and responded to questions from the floor.

After stressing the pacifist credentials of the Green Party, Shahrar gives an articulate response to the question ‘Do you support an end to the Anglo-US occupation of Iraq and a speedy withdrawal of troops?’ His view is that troops would be ‘better of not there’ but adds the important qualification that there is a need, following the aggressive military intervention and the destruction caused, for support and that troops should remain ’subject to the will of the Iraqi people’.

Yasmin used the platform to distance herself once again from the party that took Britain into an pre-emptive war and to stress that she’s more ‘anti-war’ than anyone else. Kwasi picks up on this distance and points out that Yasmin is not standing for the Yasmin Qureshi party but is standing as the PPC for the Labour Party. With supporting calls of ’shame’ from the audience, Kwasi reminds us all that being the Labour PPC means that she is representing the Labour Government.

Yasmin rolled up her sleeves and revealed her ‘Old Labour Till I Die’ tattoo while explaining her interpretation of the ‘choices’ (A new Labour word) available to the electorate in Brent East. ‘The Labour Party is the party of the organised working class by the trade union movement’ she said. ‘It contains many thousands of people who are part of the anti-war movement who are socialist and internationalist as well’ and had the ‘largest parliamentary group who opposed the war’. ‘The working class traditions of these MPs meant that they did not flinch in their opposition to the war, once it had began’. She then goes on to name check Ken Livingstone and Tony Benn the anti-war and anti-imperialist Labour party stalwarts who have given her support.

Sarah reminds everyone of the Lib Dem opposition to military action and highlights the damage that has been done to public confidence in politics and the loss of trust in government due to the secrecy and constant redefinition of reasons and evidence given by in support of this conflict.

The highlight of the film was Shahrar Ali, dressed in a orange boiler suit, logically destroying the argument for detention without trail – another Labour policy innovation from the last parliament.

Download. Link propagate.

Catch Your Own MP.

Trawling through the list of refering links to this site I came across a search engine, A9.com, that I hadn’t heard of. I followed the link to discover where this blog was ranked on the list that refered the reader to the blog. Just below the link to this blog was a link to Film Makers Against War.

I wish I’d seen the film made of the Brent East Stop The War Hustings earlier.

Here’s a link to the movie. I’ve mirrored it here to save their bandwidth.

More on this to come after I’ve had my European Politics Exam.
Prizes to whoever watches the film and then posts here with the best guess to the comment I’ve going to make.

Over 6 weeks & 53 postings the Brent East Campaign has been blogged. My keyboard is wornout and revision for my exams in backlog. This has been a prolonged high – which explains my recent apearance. I thought I’d review my efforts and share my experiences of the last six of weeks.

Brent East Campaigning: The campaign
In the tense 10 minutes that the candidates stood with the returning officer and inspected the doubtful ballot papers I was sharing my impressions of the campaign with Paul Keilthy from Archant Media Group. I was impressed with the technical quality of the campaign run by Lib Dems and Labour; each party had created and distributed localised materials, and each had been able to rapidly turn around ‘news’ of events (e.g. names visiting) into publicity materials. Paul thanked me for publicising the campaign materials (the original stated goal of Brent East Campaigning blog) as the parties don’t distribute their campaign materials directly to the press. That’s twice I’ve been taked for doing somebodys job for them this last week.

The Lib Dems appear to have had greater resources at their disposal that Labour. Team:Yasmin may have been able to pull in the ‘names’ of old Labour but Team:Sarah was superior in people power. The Lib Dems were able to distribute a far greater quantity of campaign materials due to the number of voulenteers at their disposal. I’ve yet to discover if the LDYS were mobilised to support the Brent East Campaign in the same way that the Young Fabians were.

From a technology perspective, Team:Sarah already had an established web presense which provided a source of information on her candidacy. Team:Yasmin were severly lacking in this area. Not having a website must have been detrimental to her campaign. Anyone using a search engine to uncover information about Yasmin would have been presented with a series of news articles – some more favorable than others – as well as a link to this site, whereas the search results for the Blue Team and the Orange Team yeilded links to official information sites.

I have been monitoring the ‘refering links’ statistics (see Note 1) for my website. The blog has been viewed by people refered to it after using the names of candidates in search engines (see Note 2). Another popular search term is Brent East. Searching for Brent East in Google gives the results of my blog, the websites of the Lib Dems and the Conservatives but not Labour. Even Rainbow George manages to make the first page of links (see Note 3).

Brent East Campaigning: Misrepresentation
My Brent East Campaigning blog did not cover the whole constituency. A more accurate title would have been ‘Mapesbury, Queen’s Park and Kilburn Campaigning’ as these are the areas I have gathered most of my information from. Perhaps I should have done a little ward walking. In hindsight that would have been valuable as my favorite ‘finds’ of materials have been picked off the street. Additionally, the two main contenders in the recent campaign, Labour and the Liberal Democrats, produced campaign materials that targeting specific communities in the constituency. I would have liked to have been able to post materials from other areas in Brent East. The opportunity to compare and contrast materials from other areas of the constituency would have been interesting: were the candidates/parties emphasing different aspects of their manifesto in different area?

Brent East Campaigning: Participation
My active contribution to this blog over the last 6 weeks totalled 53 postings. I don’t even know how many hours total was spent meeting candidates, scanning campaign materials and researching details. This blog has been viewed by 816 unique visitors (measured by IP address) and I’ve recevied 5 emails from readers contributing information and one comment on a posting. I would have liked to have seen greater contributions from Brent East residents, but I feel that given that the blog was only running for 8 weeks total without link propagation (other than Richard Kimbers Election resources page) the level of readership and contribution was high.

Brent East Campaigning: Pretty Pictures
Here are some images grabbed from StatCounter.com
This graphic shows the daily ‘hits’ to the blog since my first post up to the day of the election.

This graphic shows period from 9th April to 9th May.

This graphic shows the period 3rd May to 9th of May in detail…

Note 1: A refering link is the link that directed a viewer to a website. This information was collected by StatCounter.com as part of their basic counter service.
Note 2: Google has been the search engine responsible for around 95% of my refering links.
Note 3: I would link to it but that ‘breaks’ my listing in Google, so just visit google.com and search for Brent East…