Postcards arrived through my door from the Liberal Democrat party persuading me to collect LGBT people to help vote for a bloke called Jonathan Fryer.
LGBT Jonathan flyer
The card urges me, in Lib Dem bright yellow tacky font, to visit londonlgbt4jonathan.com – there I drew a blank, as the screenshot shows. I’m not sure who/what Evil Distro is, but they make ‘good records for bad people’ I think. Who are bad people?
Evil Distro - aka this lgbt Jonathan bloke
It turns out that the card is urging me to vote for Jonathan Fryer at the Euro 2009 elections. I’m not sure who he is, why he wants an LGBT voice – I’ve taken the trouble to recycle it, but just in case you stumble on by, here are three golden rules for any campaign, political or otherwise:
- Give an idea of you, your policy, or what you’re after – a subliminal postcard doesn’t get my attention.
- Make sure your website works before you publish anything, no matter what. You don’t know the power of the Internet. If there’s nothing there, people won’t pay attention to anything else you force upon them.
- Be careful who you send things to with no solicitation? Another vote you’ve lost – I can’t trust you with my details, I’m not trusting you with my country.
- Don’t go for the gay vote unless you can stand up to the scrutiny. It looks like you’re gerrymandering them.
Anyway, a google search threw up his website easy enough. Nothing LGBT on the front page, but there was a link to jonathanfryer4europe.com – so I checked it out. Nothing LGBT there either! So a fourth golden rule of politics:
Jonathan Fryer has calmly championed the LGBT cause effectively for years, as a BBC correspondent and as a SOAS lecturer; and he can be expected to do so in Europe as well.
He also has a fluent grasp of foreign policy issues, and a sense of how best to promote the British cause in Brussels, Strasbourg and elsewhere
The fact that you are unaware of this hardly gives you the right to pontificate. You are dissing a good man.
But hey, that’s British politics. Ignorance can still sway the agora, as it did in Plato’s time. But it shouldn’t prevail.
John Oakes, thank you for such an eloquent response, and for your opinion that I do not have a right to over-exaggerate my authority – which is what most politicians do. To pontificate also means to be dogmatic, which is akin to dictatorial. I don’t think that quite sums me up.
I’m really quite able to sum up all of the facts as laid in front of me, and pass an opinion – I try not to use common media, and find full text of speeches, press releases etc. to ensure I’m not speaking out of context. The opinions I give are rarely formed by the media’s obsession with politics, but my own observations from things which happen, and things which I notice happening around the world, which I, last time I checked in this free society, have total freedom to pass my opinion of.
I take every comment I receive seriously, and have re-evaluated the post. I haven’t made any changes. I don’t see where I’m dissing Jonathan Fryer. The opinion I see in this piece is of his campaign, and how I perceive it – having found no site where directed to, I searched further – for ‘Jonathan Fryer’ and ‘Jonathan Fryer LGBT’ I didn’t find anything tantalising, but most crucially, there wasn’t anything to tie Jonathan Fryer to any LGBT cause of recent value, yet his generic Jonathan4europe site was working perfectly fine – but with no sign of anything LGBT on the homepage. The piece is a comment on the campaign, which is put together by a team, I don’t see where I’m dissing the good man you refer to (I haven’t met him – yet).
My message is, and remains, that you shouldn’t publish yuor publicity until your website is ready.
I’m guessing you’re the John Oakes who is a Liberal Democrat Councillor in Bounds Green? I don’t think anyone outside politics thinks we have a ’cause’ in Europe, only a moral obligation and right under EU Conventions to be there and to have a voice, and a moral obligation as a leading world economy with a rich history of trading with the world, to unite with our neighbours.