Monday 7 July 2008

Gordon Brown and YouTube

Last Saturday political blogger 'Guido Fawkes' (real name Paul Staines) wrote an interesting piece about the PM's use of, or more accurately non-use of, YouTube. A couple of months ago team Brown came up with the idea that we could send Mr Brown a question and he would answer it via the YouTube video site. It was being proclaimed as a sort of 'Prime Ministers Questions' for the people, utter rubbish in my opinion. Surely it wouldn't have been very much like PMQs on Wednesdays in the House of Commons: there would have been no direct person to person sparring as happens in Parliament, I would only be happy if I could interrogate Mr Brown properly. Another thing is that he could just cherry pick the questions he wanted to answer and my feeling is we would have the "now we are spending 'Y' pounds on the NHS, back in 1997 only 'X' pounds was spent on it" sort of responses. As I have said before on this blog such statistics are meaningless to the man in the street.

Now according to Guido, Brown was supposed to start his video replies by the end of June but nothing has happened so far. This is the problem, his advisers come up with an idea intended to make the PM look 'with it' and really connected to the computer age. This is rather silly because at the moment Gordon Brown has much to much on his plate especially with his propensity to micro-manage everything, a trait for which he has been highly criticised. Right now there are a hundred and one problems for him to deal with, I don't want him diverted on to relative trivia. The other thing that has to be said is that Brown isn't a natural speaking to camera, I'm not blaming him for this because not everyone can do it. But I fear he would only be mocked if this experiment in trying to connect with the electorate ever went ahead.

No comments: