We have a weekly briefing meeting in Chesterfield for campaigners and councillors, every Sunday at 9pm. It’s going on right now. They’ve all be trooping through, clutching completed canvass cards and the latest bits of opposition literature in their hands.
They’ve all very tanned. Which is a good sign. It means that they’re spending every daylight hour pounding pavements.
ForecastFox says they’re not going to have such a nice week of it next week!
Took this one morning last week after my all-nighter. Rather pretty view of the famous Chesterfield crooked spire through the early morning fog.
Just as impressive were the market stalls, still almost deserted as at 6am, only the first traders were arriving. The Lib Dem council has recently refurbished the stalls by attracting grant money, and the market is beginning to turn a corner after many years of decline.
Since I’ve spent today staring at either the folding machine or the printer, I thought I’d share that thrill with you.
Here’s the printer, a gorgeous, pouting MZ770E capable of printing 150/minute in up to two colours at once:
And here’s the folder, slightly slower, variable speed, semi-automatic fold settings (ie they are automatic, but the automated bit no longer works reliably)
And just to complete the set, here’s a panorama of the print room. Like many Lib Dem campaigns we have a full set of our leaflets on the wall as a reference and we also put up copies of opposition leaflets when we get them. Although we usually put out many more leaflets than our opponents, in this campaign, Labour seem to be getting a lot out.
I’m very pleased to see Duncan Borrowman coming out top of today’s head-to-head of websites of aspiring Greater London Assembly candidates.
I can’t remember if I knew Duncan before the Leicester South by-election, but that’s certainly where I’ve spent longest in his company. I was data-monkey and he was drafting target letters so we had to work together. I got to proofread the tabloid newspaper-style leaflets he can produce in a startling short amount of time – I even got sent out at one point to take the key photos for a front page story condemning the closure of a local secondary school. Years later, the site was still occupied by nothing more than a boarded-up secondary school…
Since then, I’ve bumped into Borrowman across the country at various different by-election campaigns, training sessions and conferences. He’s the party’s premier artworker and shares his knowledge wherever he can. Some of his top-tips learned in PagePlus have now become part of my daily routines when I’m laying out leaflets myself.
I unfortunately missed out on the chance to see him in action campaigning for a London seat during the Bromley by-election by being on holiday abroad at the crucial point, but the text message exchange I had with him ahead of polling day demonstrates his sense of humour and his drive to get more Lib Dems elected:
“Come and help in Bromley, it’s really close”
“I can’t, I’m holiday in France”
“France is right next to Kent, you’ve no excuse!”
As a campaigner, he’s one of the party’s top guys. He’d be good news for the party and good news for the capital as one of our Assembly members. He just missed out on getting on the list last time (in fact, if one of our Assembly members were to drop dead, he’d be next in line for a job) I wish him all the best in the GLA selection battle. I know if I were voting in London, he’d be top of my list.
Last night, I had two weird dreams in quick succession that have stayed with me for an hour or two.
In the first one, in a house I was living in, I found out by measuring that there was an extra room that had been bricked up. When I got into the room, I found it was full of Lostlike electronics equipment and various spying things like old video cameras, still working, blinking lights, the works. There was a monitor and a VCR so I hit play to see what was being taped, and…
… it was a music video for a Wham-alike band of 80s male singers with bleached, brushed back hair like Spike from Buffy. And the video started with a comet going across the night sky.
Strange. So, after the alarm went off, I fell asleep again and this time dreamed I was in some sort of lecture / seminar room at the top of either the Eiffel Tower or the Empire State building or something like that, with the viewing platform visible through a window out of the corner of my eye. Rather than paying attention to the lecture I was distracted by the public, including one young woman in a chavvy red coat and a little girl of 5 or 6 in a little pink puffer jacket. Woman was encouraging girl to climb up the scaffolding to get higher than mummy. So woman climbed up the scaffolding and waved her arms – “Look how high mummy is, can you get higher?”. Little girl then climbed scaffolding and waved both her arms around.
It’s pretty obvious where this is headed, isn’t it?
Mummy at that point fell off, and the dream cut to the classic movie shot of person falling, from directly above, flailing arms and legs and screams.
And little girl thinks it’s a game and throws herself off laughing and chuckling.
And thankfully, that’s where I woke up.
Here’s a trailer for the film I was an extra in!
It’s nearly out – mid May. Can’t wait! I should be fairly obvious – there’s a scene where Webb appears in the audience, and I’m sitting in the spotlight that lights him up. Mind you, the camera was a long way away…
The Lib Dems in Nottingham launched their manifesto for the City Council on Monday this week, and the room we had booked for the event was the Large Hall at the International Community Centre on Nottingham’s Mansfield Road.
It was a good meeting – just one member of the press there, despite a fairly wide invitation list – but a number of party members turned up to cheer us on. I understand that actually, the Labour party, who got David Blunkett down to launch theirs, only had two presspeople there, so we shouldn’t feel snubbed. And the resulting story in the newspaper (one of a series of different party’s manifestos) was good coverage.
However, the point of this particular blog posting isn’t about our manifesto at all. It’s something I noticed from one of the windows of the Large Hall of the ICC.
It was a long view across the city skyscape to Green’s Mill, the working windmill museum in Sneinton. As the crow flies, it’s not that far away, but it is directly across the city centre. There are many tall buildings in the way, not least the Victoria Centre and its flats, a large office block on the far side of the road, and a much older three storey shop/office complex directly opposite.
Of all the windows in the room, only one gave the exact alignment of buildings necessary to have the clear space across the city.
A few years ago, I would have assumed this was just a coincidence but since I have spent two years serving as a planning councillor, I now know that long-views across the city centre are things that are routinely considered by architects, and are frequently a point that is specifically discussed at development control committee meetings when deciding whether to grant planning permission.
Of course, elected members have to take on trust what they are told. Only architects and surveyors can know with any certainty how high a building will be, and what specific views will be obstructed and what not. This information is presented in a variety of ways – photomontages with real photos of the city with mock-up versions of new buildings digitally inserted, or traditional line drawings from the architect showing relative heights. And you have to decide how credible those reports are. Are they showing an unusual vantage point? Does “unobstructed view from the castle” mean the parts of the castle most of us have access to, or from the roof of the castle? And so on and so on. However important it seems in committee, it’s unlikely that a permission will be granted on the basis of an unimpeded view. So if, years down the line when the building is finished, it turns out that it is in the way, and it does block a certain view from a certain direction, it’s very unlikely that the Council will be able to turn around and say, “Knock it down, it’s too high!”
Planning councillors are seen in the local government community at large with the same sort of suspicion given in the wider community to the sort of people who like trains. I joined the planning committee two years ago as a sort of penance. At the time, I was persuaded that it was in the Lib Dem’s interest for me to become, for one year only, the opposition representative on the council’s ultimate decision making committee, the Executive Board. This position had a healthy remuneration, but it also makes a councillor ineligible to serve on the scrutiny side of the council, which is where opposition councillors spend most of their time. So becoming an Executive Member Without Portfolio took me off most the committees I had been on in the previous two years. As a way of balancing the load more fairly, they put me on Development Control, which I thought I would hate. As it turns out, it’s now the committee I look forward to most, and one I shall certainly be making an effort to serve on in the new council should I be fortunate enough to be re-elected in 15 days’ time.
There are some things you see on an American TV show that you just know will have been excerpted onto YouTube.
Just like this one.
(No spoilers – it’s House doing his clinic duty and doesn’t cover any of the wider story…)
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