Monday 8 June 2009

Doesn't this picture say it all?



Is Gord capable of inspiring his party and the nation?

This is picture that was first featured here at the end of 2006 several months before Brown became prime minister. There he is, amongst enthusiastic Labour supporters and you would expect him to at least make the effort to show that he is delighted to see them. 

But look at him - he is rigid and cold as a cucumber. He's hardly an inspiration to even the most ardent enthusiast.
Yes it's easy to say that politics has become about personalities and not policies - but if a leader's personality makes it hard for him/her to inspire supporters about party policies and the vision behind them then you might as well not have them in the first place
Although you can get trained to deal with the technical points of communication the ability to make a compelling case is something that you either have or don't have. Brown's in the latter category.  

Will he survive tonight? Probably. What will be the consequence? The wounded leader will drift on, there'll be more YouTube and Alan Sugar-type gimmicks and the probability of a Labour melt-down at the general election will become even greater.

To me it's blindingly obvious that with Brown Labour is dead - only the demise will be prolonged. Without him the party stands a fighting chance of impeding the Cameron band-wagon.

(This post has been posted here as well as the main site because of the problems some people have had in getting through)

23 comments:

LTL said...

First.. for the second time today. hanks for posting this here Mike. Not sure if there are enough of us around for a discussion.
On Topic.. it beggars belief that the PLP will just let this situation roll. Just goes to show, turkeys and Christmas! The 'honourable' members of the PLP really do put 'self' first. IMO it's not good for democracy for any party to have an enormous majority.. then again .. we are learning that democracy really doesn't figure in today's politics. Tick tock.

LTL said...

hanks = Thanks

Friedrich said...

not even the URL trick or putting ww2.politicalbetting.com instead of politicalbetting.com in the address bar works?

Anonymous said...

its the same problem as last time. Could Mike put in the same fix as last time please

LTL said...

I swapped onto a laptop and can get on main site as normal - it's running IE8 under vista. This one is IE8 under XP. Not sure if this helps. Other than that same as Friedrich.

Anonymous said...

Friedrich,i am getting the same problem

LTL said...

Now getting a parse error on main site using laptop where it was working. I know you are moving servers but thought you'd like to know.

Administrator said...

Why don't you just get a template for Blogger and use this? And point Political Betting.com to this site?

Creating a custom template that looks good wouldn't be that hard and would save money on server costs and wouldn't go down!

Anonymous said...

Its really annoying. I tried using a proxy server, and the proxy server doesnt recognise PB.com nor www2. pb.com

Therefore its not my pc so techies have advised its a server issue on the site?? anyone any better ideas why people cant get in?

Administrator said...

It is a server issue, the best thing to do is make pb.com point to this site and use this for the time being.

PB should look at my site for an example www.irfanahmed.org. It has never been down and I don't think any Blogger site goes down because the Google/Blogger servers are among the best in the world.

Even http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/ is on Blogger and I think PB should move over!

Anonymous said...

But the site is up and running and people are happilyu posating away, its only some users that cant get in, thats what I dont understand

James Burdett said...

Hmm I'm now having issues with the site, it says that there are hundreds of posts but I can only see the first 20, with no pagination :(

Plato said...

No matter what I do - only first comments are visible.

Comment forward/back just says Older Comments and goes nowhere.

Anonymous said...

Its definitely a server issue blocking stuff, its nothing to do with PC's or anything to do with broadband or cable as far as I know. Its immensely frustrating, critcal moments in politics and I cant see what people are saying...

Paul S said...

There's some rumours around that Purnell will stand for the leadership tomorrow if no one else does.

Stuart Dickson said...

Help!!

Now the old DNS workaround has stopped working!!

ie. writing in 87.106.214.196

I just get the following error message:

"Network Error (dns_unresolved_hostname)


Your requested host "www2.87.106.214.196" could not be resolved by DNS.


For assistance, contact your network support team."

... and the actual address changes automatically to:

http://www2.87.106.214.196/

Robert and Mike: you have got to work this problem out. It will kill the site.

Anonymous said...

I haven't been able to get on for days now. My life is rather empty but my wii skills are improving! Come on guys get it sorted PLEASE!!

Thedevonloft

Ave it 09 said...

Mike

Get this f**king sorted now!!!!!

I can't get in at all!!!

As previous posters have said, this site is DEAD if you can't get in!!!!!

Sean Thomas said...

cant get into the main site. this grows wearisome

Administrator said...

Mike despite what you are saying I can not access the website. Can you please sort me out as soon as possible!

Anonymous said...

To those with technical issues

- Delete your PB.com cookies
- Go to www2.politicalbetting.com
- Make a comment

That should sort it.

Anonymous said...

Still can't get in to main site. Tried everything I can. A very sad demise of a great site.

TDL

Anonymous said...

If you still can't get through to PB try this link

http://212.227.143.195/