Media coverage of Daniel Hannan's attack on Gordon Brown in Strasbourg

Yesterday, when I posted news of Daniel Hannan’s speech to the European Parliament, it had already attracted 22,000 viewings and 208 comments on YouTube in less than 24 hours. The latest score at the time of writing has shot up to 660,691 viewings and 4,560 comments.

Yet there’s still been no mention of it on any BBC news programme or on its website. Nor will you be able to find any reference to it on the websites of ITN, Sky News or Channel 4 News.

If you search through the websites of leading British newspapers, you’ll find that the only one with any reference to the speech happens to be the one for which Mr Hannan writes and on which he has a blog, namely The Daily Telegraph.

But the US media has been rather less neglectful in their coverage of this story, and anyone interested in hearing more about the speech can see an extended interview with the MEP on the Fox News website HERE.

And you can watch this space for some comments on the rhetorical highlights within the next day or two.

It's time Gordon Brown stopped recycling other people's lines

I’ve warned Gordon Brown and his speechwriters before (HERE) that it’s not a good idea to lift lines from other people’s speeches. This was prompted by one of the lines from a speech he made in July last year:

“There’s nothing bad about Britain that cannot be corrected by what’s good about Britain …”

This bore an uncanny resemblance to something Bill Clinton had said in his inaugural address in January 1993:

“There is nothing wrong with America that cannot be cured by what is right with America.”

Then, when Brown spoke to the US Congress three weeks ago, he came up with:

“There is no old Europe, no new Europe, there is only your friend Europe.”

Not surprisingly, this got some commentators wondering if his scriptwriters had now started borrowing from the collected works of Barack Obama, whose address at the 2004 Democratic Convention had included the folowing:

“There is not a liberal America and a conservative America -- there is the United States of America. There is not a Black America and a White America and Latino America and Asian America -- there’s the United States of America.”

Obama subsequently recycled a similar version in other speeches, including the one in Chicago after he had won the election:

“We have never been just a collection of individuals or a collection of red states and blue states. We are and always will be the United States of America”

Recycling your own material may be acceptable, but there is nothing whatsoever to be gained from recycling material that sounds as though it’s been lifted from someone else – other than the kind electoral disaster Joe Biden experienced when his unattributed use of lines from a Neil Kinnock speech brought his otherwise promising 1987 campaign for the Democratic nomination to an abrupt end.

But Brown and his speechwriters still don’t seem to get it. So, here we are, hardly three weeks since he told the US Congress:

“There is no old Europe, no new Europe, there is only your friend Europe”

we hear him telling the European Parliament:

“There is no old Europe, no new Europe, no east or west Europe. There is only one Europe – our home Europe.”

Pass the sick bag please ...

Daniel Hannan v. Gordon Brown at the European Parliament

Gordon Brown’s speech to the European Parliament yesterday got fairly wide media coverage, but there’s been little or no mention of a powerful response to it by Daniel Hannan, a Tory MEP for South East England.

Less than 24 hours later, Hannan’s speech has had 22,106 viewings on YouTube and has attracted 208 (mostly favourable) comments.* A link to the speech has also already appeared on the page about him on Wikipedia

If evidence were needed that it’s worth posting speeches on YouTube, as I recently suggested the LibDems should be doing (HERE), then this is surely it.

It’s also encouraging to see that at least one young British politician is capable of crafting and delivering an impressive 3 minute speech - and raises the question of why we don't get to see more of the European Parliament on TV.

* UPDATE 4 HOURS LATER: these scores have now gone up to 36,748 viewings and 833 comments.

* UPDATE 10 HOURS LATER: these scores have now gone up to 167,779 viewings and 1,660 comments.

* UPDATE 14 HOURS LATER: these scores have now gone up to 316,779 viewings and 2,787 comments.

* UPDATE 24 HOURS LATER: these scores have now gone up to 660,691 viewings and 4,560 comments.

Jargon and gobbledygook comedy sketch

Anyone who runs courses on presentation and communication skills will be all too familiar with the problem of jargon and gobbledygook that was highlighted by yesterday’s announcement that the Local Government Association has published a list of 100 words that it wants to see banned (for news story see here and, for the complete list, see here).

Until last year, I’d never tried my hand at writing anything other than non-fiction, but my wife and I had been finding it difficult to find a double act on the internet that we could perform at an annual event in our village hall – previous years efforts had included a politically correct version of a conversation between Nelson and Hardy before the battle of Trafalgar and one about gardening between God and St Francis of Assisi.

So we started playing around with jargon and gobbledygook, both managerial and youth-speak, and came up with a visit to a clinic by a young woman who was having trouble making herself understood.

The most difficult part was finding a suitable way of bringing it to an end, but the Archbishop of Canterbury came to our rescue with his widely publicised lecture about Sharia law that had happened about a week earlier.

Sad though I may be, I had read and watched the whole speech and had been appalled by the incomprehensibility of his language, and, in particular, by the discovery that one of his sentences was made up of 149 words (i.e. more than nine times longer than the 16 word average sentence length in effective speeches).

High risk though it may have been, I decided to read the whole sentence out and, in Basil Fawlty's immortal words after mentioning the war to the German guests, I think I got away with it.

Anyone wanting to use the following is welcome to do so, but will probably need to modify the ending with a more topical role model than the Archbishop of Canterbury – Robert Peston, perhaps?


THE COMMUNICATION CLINIC
by Max & Joey Atkinson, 2008


(CONSULTANT RINGS BELL)

Next please.

(ENTER CLIENT CHEWING GUM, MUTTERING TO SOMEONE ON MOBILE PHONE)

Ah – hello Miss Fitt.

Hi

How are you today?

I’m good – and yourself?

Very well thanks. And thank you for filling in our psychometric inter-cognitive transactional protocol – from which it looks as though you may be having problems making yourself understood.

You’re so not wrong there.

And that it may be interfering with your social life.

Tell me about it.

No - you’re the one who’s supposed to be telling me about it.

Well at this particular moment in time, I want to address the issue ahead of it getting any worse going forward.

So how often would you say people are having trouble understanding you?

Ballpark figure?

Yes.

24/7.

OK - and what’s made you decide to do something about it?

Well like because I so want to play on a level playing field, and like sing from the same hymn sheet as everyone else.

Hmm – and how does it actually feel when someone doesn’t understand what you’re saying?

Well, like, I mean to say, and to be quite honest with you, it’s literally surreal – and whenever it happens I think: “don’t go there” -- End of.

But you are still going there, aren’t you?

Yeah, but – like - if you’ll just bear with me, the bottom line is that it’s like being stuck between a rock and a hard place.

Mm huh.

And, to be quite honest with you I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve been there, done that and got the T shirt.

Hmm.

I mean how weird is that?

And how are you coping with it?

Well, it’s like doing my head in.

Have you tried to do anything about the problem before coming here today?

I’ve tried doing some blue sky thinking, but it – like - wasn’t actually rocket science -- and I just so couldn’t get my head round it.

Anything else?

I’ve had a go at thinking outside the box and running a few flags up the flagpole to see if anyone salutes.

And did they?

No, I never seem to get past first base, because in actual fact and to be perfectly honest with you, someone keeps moving the goal posts.

Have you ever thought about moving the goal posts yourself?

You what?

Ever thought of moving the goal posts your self?

No, cos I’m not empowered and don’t have ownership of them.

Ahhh, you see this is almost certainly why you’re finding things so difficult -- because really good communicators – the really effective ones -- like the Archbishop of Canterbury, aren’t afraid to own the goal posts and move them wherever they like. Your problem is that you speak in shorthand, whereas he speaks in long hand.

Wicked.

The point is, Miss Fitt, that if you’re going to get through to people, you need to start using the likes of him as a role model, and that means making your sentences more like this one, which I’ll read you from the text of the lecture he gave last week.

Cool.

“The rule of law is thus not the enshrining of priority for the universal/abstract dimension of social existence but the establishing of a space accessible to everyone

(MISS FITT STARTS TEXTING ON MOBILE PHONE)

"in which it is possible to affirm and defend a commitment to human dignity as such, independent of membership in any specific human community or tradition, so that when specific communities or traditions are in danger of claiming finality for their own boundaries of practice and understanding, they are reminded that they have to come to terms with the actuality of human diversity...

(CONSULTANT NOTICES MISS FITT ISN’T LISTENING AND COUGHS LOUDLY TO GET HER ATTENTION BACK)

"… they are reminded that they have to come to terms with the actuality of human diversity and that the only way of doing this is to acknowledge the category of 'human dignity as such', a non-negotiable assumption that each agent (with his or her historical and social affiliations)

(MISS FITT YAWNS)

"could be expected to have a voice in the shaping of some common project for the well-being and order of a human group.”

(PAUSE)

So there you are Miss Fitt -- see what I mean?

(LONG PAUSE – MISS FITT LOOKS BAFFLED)

Well, I hear what you say.

And?

Whatever!

Whatever what?

I think he’s completely out of order.

Check the fixtures and fittings before you speak

Prince William recently gave a speech that, not surprisingly, received national media coverage. After all, here was a very famous person who had lost his mother at a young age and in tragic circumstances becoming patron of the Child Bereavement Charity, which helps children and families who have lost a parent.

It must have been difficult for him not to accept their invitation – and even more difficult to have to make a speech in which he could hardly not mention his mother, the late Princess Diana.

If that wasn’t going to be tough enough, he then had to speak without a lectern and without a stand for the microphone, even though the organizers must surely have known that it was going to be broadcast to a mass television audience.

The result was that the viewers saw a nervous young man standing at the bottom of a staircase with sheets of paper in one hand and a microphone in the other (see below).

Not surprisingly, it could hardly be said to be a model example of how to deliver a speech. However difficult Prince William was going to find it speaking about something so close to his heart, it would have been a little bit easier if he (or the organizers) had made sure that clutching paper and a microphone would not be necessary parts of the performance.

The very obvious general point is that, whenever speakers can, they should always check out – in advance – the room, layout, fixtures, fittings and equipment. Otherwise you risk falling foul of the inadequate arrangements made by your hosts.

Why haven't the Lib Dems learnt from Obama’s use of the internet?

The importance of the internet, and especially YouTube, in Barack Obama’s successful campaign in coming from nowhere to the presidency has been widely recognized (e.g. see here, or just type 'Obama's use of the internet' into Google).

Shortly after the foundation of the Liberal Democrats 21 years ago, they too were pretty much nowhere - it doesn't get much worse than 4% in the polls and 4th, after the Green Party in the Euro elections.

Then, as now, it was always difficult for the third party to get anything like parity in media coverage with the other two parties. But then there was no internet, whereas now there is.

Yet here we are, a whole week since the Liberal Democrat Spring Conference in Harrogate came to an end, and not a single speech from the leader, or anyone else at the conference, has appeared on YouTube. All there is to be seen of it is an amateurish looking video, complete with some awful background library music, that was apparently ‘shown … to introduce party leader Nick Clegg’s keynote speech’ (see here).

But you can't actually watch his keynote speech on YouTube, nor the speech by Vince Cable or anyone else who spoke at the conference.

Having worked with Paddy Ashdown in the early days of trying to get the new party off the ground, I know that we’d have given our eye teeth to have had access to something like YouTube back in 1988 (especially as there were hardly enough funds to pay for the first party political broadcast).

In December last year, there were press announcements that the LibDems had appointed a new ‘Director of Policy & Communications’ - which raises the questions of what he and his colleagues have been doing since then, and why they haven’t learnt the most obvious, simplest and cheapest lesson from the Obama campaign - i.e. about how to make the most of the internet.

If Bill Gates doesn't read bullet points from PowerPoint slides ...

I’ve just been watching a talk by Bill Gates on How I'm trying to change the world now - the full version of which can be seen HERE.

Unfortunately, his plans for changing the world don't seem to extend to instructing Microsoft to withdraw, or at least radically overhaul, their market-leading presentation software.

Apart from his subject matter (defeating malaria and improving the quality of teaching), there were three other things about his presentation that struck me as interesting.

1. Bill Gates knows better than to read bullet points from PowerPoint slides
Although he showed a few slides (mainly pictures, maps and graphs), he did not use any that consisted of long lists of bullet points, and therefore didn’t have to keep turning round and reading from them – like the vast majority of PowerPoint users I’ve seen over the years.

If the founder of Microsoft has no use for the opening templates PowerPoint offers to its users (i.e. headings and lists), why doesn't he have any qualms about allowing his company to make millions of dollars from giving millions of people the false impression that listing bullet points is a sure-fire route to making an effective presentation?

2. Bill Gates knows that some technologies can help teachers but not that others can hinder them
Although he singles out video and DVD as technologies that can help to improve the quality of teaching, he seems completely unaware that other technologies, (e.g. PowerPoint, electronic whiteboards, etc.) might be reducing the quality of teaching.

Again, isn’t it time he woke up to the fact that PowerPoint may have led thousands of teachers and lecturers down a blind alley that's leaving millions of students a year in a state of boredom and/or confusion?

3. Bill Gates knows that objects can be used as effective visual aids
Apart from the applause for his announcement that he was going to give everyone in the audience a free copy of a book, the most positive response came when he took the lid off a jar and pretended to release mosquitoes into the auditorium (see below).

This may be about as far away from relying on PowerPoint slides as you can get, but is a simple and effective form of visual aid (for more on which, see HERE where you can watch examples of the Archbishop of York and Barack Obama doing something similar).

If only Microsoft would preach what its founder practises, there might be a chance of saving the world from the ever-spreading epidemic of death by PowerPoint.