Lib Dems launch in Newbury, but only the Greens are Tweeting
The Liberal Democrats in Newbury have launched their bid to capture West Berkshire from the Conservatives with the opening of a campaign headquarters in the town, but they are not using social media, indeed the Green Party seem to be the only local candidate on Twitter.
David Rendel is the candidate and he aims to take back the seat he originally won in the 1993 Newbury by-election and held through the 1997 and 2001 general elections. The historically Conservative seat was then won by Richard Benyon in 2005 with a majority of 3,460.
Budding citizen journalist and photographer Jim Millen was there and kindly supplied these photographs. We met on Twitter (you can follow @JimMillen here) and he too is blogging about the election and as he was at the launch of the Liberal Democrat’s campaign in Newbury, do visit his blog to read his take on proceedings.
Interestingly Millen makes an observation that I commented on during a radio interview with Newbury Sound and seems to be worryingly true – local politicians are shunning social media. Perhaps little wonder when you see what happened to Scottish Labour candidate Stuart MacLennan over his historical and somewhat abusive tweets.
Millen comments: “I was a bit surprised at how low-tech the campaign HQ was. Sure, I’m maybe an outlier towards the techy end of the spectrum, but I would have expected to see at least the odd laptop or some evidence of technology! I got the feeling that not too many of those present were on Twitter.”
Indeed, a quick check shows that the twitter name @DavidRendel is not even registered to prevent someone else using it. @RichardBenyonMP is registered, but dormant, as is @RichardBenyon. Neither have a single tweet, which does leave them vulnerable to be revoked by Twitter. Similarly there are accounts registered for @HannahCooper, the name of the Labour candidate, @BrianBurgess, who is standing as an independent, but neither has started Tweeting. It does not appear David Black the UKIP candidate has a Twitter account. Of course, without tweets we cannot be sure if any of the accounts are legitimate.
The Green Party is showing more social media promise than most of the parties and in Newbury there is no exception, indeed their candidate @AdrianHollister is tweeting and has actually been on Twitter since March 2009.
If you know of alternative Twitter accounts, or indeed any other social media platforms any of the candidates are using please do tell us in the comments below.
As a journalist covering different election battles I came to realise that when all sides were accusing you of bias, then you were probably doing something right. Of course, now as a business owner offering help with social media... we could technically be engaged by a candidate seeking help. If we are we will declare it, until then we’ll keep our objectivity sharpened!