This entry was posted on
Tuesday, February 8th, 2005 at
9:28 am and is filed
under UK General Election 2005.

I’ve suggested previously that bloggers and proxy-bloggers note/scan and publish any questionable campaign material. Now we have a big gun on the case, too.

BBC – Election 2005: Below the radar: In the run-up to this year’s General Election, Newsnight’s Michael Crick will examine each party’s campaign, but we want you to get involved too.

No need to change the plan, just make sure that when you publish, you also send it on to Michael Crick – and that you get a name-check for your blog in return.

Moving right along…

Guardian – Tories issue libel writ against Times: The Conservative Party last night raised the political temperature in the run-up to the expected general election in May by issuing a writ against the Times newspaper for defaming its campaign director, Lynton Crosby. The action follows two articles in the Murdoch-owned newspaper claiming that Mr Crosby had told Michael Howard that he was going to lose the next election before the campaign even officially started. The decision to sue, personally approved by Michael Howard and Guy Black, his director of communications, reflects concern among leading Conservatives that the Times, once the paper of the Tory establishment, is becoming a cheerleader for Tony Blair.

Becoming? As in only just now? Has David Hencke been paying attention these past 7 years?

Finally, some news from Bloggerheads:

The briefing/planning meeting for Backing Blair goes ahead as planned this evening. Barring the unexpected, the site should launch sometime tomorrow. Perhaps in the evening.

The London Underground Song is doing extremely good work in the pre-launch period. It was reaching upwards of 3,000 people a day last week and recently has been reaching over 10,000 people a day. Yesterday it reached 26,485 unique visitors. 1,974 of them were curious enough to check out the (currently empty) main page of Backing Blair, even though there’s no direct link to it from the Flash page.

So we’ve got a strong wind behind us, and we’re almost good to go.

Core materials for Backing Blair will be seen for the first time at our meeting this evening. I’d love to give you a sneak preview, but the squirrels insist that I keep my nuts close to my chest for now. I can, however, tell you what’s at the core of the campaign… we’re going to subvert/mock key Blair messages by cutting them down to their bare bones and raise issues such as Iraq and the ‘war’ on terror in an overly-positive fashion that borders on the Orwellian.

Along the way, we plan to:
– Raise awareness of the website/message via grass roots campaigning (posters, stickers, local groups)
– Raise funds via the website
– Use that money to raise awareness of the website/message via mainstream advertising

We start with nothing but elbow grease and goodwill, and can continue at this level throughout the campaigning season and still have an impact. But if we raise as little as 1,000 squid… ooh, boy are we going to have some serious fun.