Somebody Tell Teacher!

I've always like Twitter. I feel it's a brilliant means for discussion across a range of topics and the public element to it makes it better than either MySpace or Facebook. In particular political discussion can not only be edifying but also a great source of entertainment.

Not last night though as the whole political twitterverse seemed to descend into a splurge of name-calling and tattle-telling with the main culprits, embarrassingly, being on my own side of the debate.

One of the Conservative's most prolific bloggers, Tory Bear, has chosen to lambast Labour supporter and active campaigner Bevanite Ellie over a joke which was not even her own. Rather the joke was originally 'tweeted' by a Labour councillor but TB has gone after the messenger instead.

To be honest the joke wasn't particularly controversial and typical of Labour's black humour towards Margaret Thatcher. However, TB jumped on this opportunity like a rapist and started demanding an apology like the whining kid who sits at the front of the class.

This then seemed to start a whole war over twitter of general poor quality barraging. If you're going to insult the other side at least try and be witty, yeah?

Much as I dislike Labour this seems to me like another Sun episode where the demand for an apology for the soldier's mispelt name actually engendered sympathy for the party. I sense jealousy over Ellie's success emanating from Mr. Bear and he will do well in future to keep this in check.

#welovethenhs but should we have to?

The seemingly increasingly unreliable twitter had another outage yesterday but this time not because of hackers. No, this time the British public flooded the social-networking site with the hashtag #welovethenhs as part of a campaign by the creator of Father Ted, Graham Linehan. The accomplished tweeter has had some other successful campaigns in the past involving subjects from The Daily Mail to Eurovision.

Linehan goes on to say in his interview (linked to above) that "you attack [the NHS] at your peril". This is a response to the video above as well as a concerted effort by the American right to use the example of the British healthcare system as the argument against 'Obamacare'. Certainly there have been a lot of fallacies purported on news stations such as Fox News and these have since been succinctly dealt with by The Daily Telegraph.

The article seems to confirm what Stephen Fry tweeted about the matter and all should have been cleared up nicely. Unfortunately things didn't stop there and people's adoration of the NHS gushed through twitter. The problem with this is that the NHS is nowhere near a perfect system, in fact I would say for certain that the US system is a heck of a lot better than our own.

It would perhaps be unfair to have no provisions whatsoever for those who fall ill but a major reliance on the free market is simply the most efficient way to distribute healthcare. The traditional argument that 'at least a doctor here checks my pulse before my wallet' is absurd. These people associate health insurance solely with going on holiday but most Americans consider this a monthly bill that gets paid with utilities etc. The only reason we don't complain is because it gets taken out of our taxes, which pay for a variety of goods and services; including healthcare.

The campaign has also turned on Daniel Hannan who has also been a victim of @glinner's campaign. Despite making some authentic criticisms of the NHS, albeit not necessarily constructive, he has been made a scapegoat by even his very own party. The campaign has rallied such patriotic support that it has blinded some normally sensible people and whipped renewed fire into those on the left.

The problem lies in the fact that this isn't even much of a left/right issue as much as it is an authoritarian/liberal issue. It's the difference between wanting the government to interfere with healthcare provision and, as Hannan points out, flooded with bureaucracy or leaving it to the efficiencies of the free market. In my mind, Britain is leaning heavily towards the wrong side.

So America is slowly backing away from it's NHS hate campaign but I personally hope that this allows us to look at why the British healthcare system was picked out for ridicule. Of course a myriad of people have their own success stories with the NHS but this time the grass really is greener.

Lib Dems are all a twitter with Cleggy.

Most Torys are too old for computer whilst most Labour supporters are too poor. On this basis it was always going to be the Lib Dems making breakthroughs with technology in the party politics arena. The blogoshpere is dominated by Lib Dem blogs with middle-class mothers and self-employed geeks offering their opinion on the issues of the day. Every so often they come up with good points but more often than not it's the boring drivel you would expect from anywhere on the Lib Dem, proportionally represented, pyramid of power.

Anyway the reason I bring this up is that now the party leader has joined his supporters by doing an interview with the general public via twitter. However, rather than throw himself into the great unwashed, questions will be vetted by, you guessed, The Independent newspaper.

This is being hailed by many here in geek-world as the greatest thing since sliced bread and the Lib Dems themselves are mopping it up like the badly aimed cumshot it is. In reality it's not going to be any different to any other contact method your ordinary man on the street has with Nick Clegg apart from being limited in terms of time and to 140 characters. All questions which he doesn't want to be answered won't make it through The Independent and any responses that do come back will be shortened versions of "We don't have any policies we're ever going to implement because Britain has a two-party system. We just like to chip in with nonsense about PR every so often".

Stop wasting bandwidth.

Power to the Tweeple!

Most of the blogs on here tend to be very generalised accounts of governments across the world but this is a bit more localised and personal.

For some reason we get the Daily Mail delivered to our house. We used to get the Daily Express but for some reason (my mother's Nazi tendencies) the authoritarian bile poisons our letter box every morning.

From this attitude you can imagine my glee when my beloved twitter launched a campaign involving many influential tweeters to skew the poll asking "Should the NHS allow gypsies to jump the queue?" towards the positive. Reports have come in that within 20 minutes we were already at 86% yes 32% no! By 94-6 the Daily Mail responded by removing the poll. At a time when the Iranian regime is being criticised by the world press for something very similar, it is interesting to see the same thing here in our own country.

What will possibly be most interesting is the reaction of the Daily Mail. It seems hard to defend their position, especially as these polls are specially constructed. Furthermore they can't argue that twitter users are all lefties because there is a clear sense of irony. A fightback against such medieval attitudes.

Hopefully the rest of the press will have a field day too. I've already seen an online response by The Guardian and MSN has branded the poll 'ridiculous'. With the Mail trying to corrupt the British people's views towards xenophobic hatred, hopefully this will give the public a much-needed reality check.