Politics and culture Articles

Am still shocked about Michael Jackson¹s passing. Went to bed after seeing Kirsty Wark interrupted in the middle of a Newsnight story on expenses (BBC executives this time) to receive news in her ear-piece that he’d been rushed to hospital. Awoke to hear he¹d snuffed it. People have compared it to Elvis dying or John Lennon¹s death.

I found myself in a BBC television studio last week where I was asked to complete the sentence ‘the big issue of the next
general election will be…’ My answer (having been told to make it a
soundbite) was three little words ‘the economy stupid’. They were
asking about the next general election, whenever it may be. Voting for
our European representatives had not yet begun. Had they asked what the
issue of the European election was, I’d have answered that the thing
about the 2009 European election was the fact that it had nothing to do
with Europe.

The revolution, it seems, will not just be televised but also blogged,
twittered and Facebooked. At least that was the message last week from
a panel of eminent online campaigner-types who I happened to be
chairing in discussion with an audience of largely off-line social
activist types at an event run by the voter-registration pressure group
Operation Black Vote. The title of exactly what we were discussing kept
changing. I was initially tempted in by the promising-sounding ‘Representation 2.0: Engaging the Obama Generation’.
The bit after the colon later changed to ‘Using New Technology to Make
Waves’ and finally on the night ‘How to Develop Your Social Networks
and Mobilise Communities for Action’.

When I last happened to be in the family way I was a resident of
Manchester M14, an area with a high incidence of teen pregnancy, to the
extent that every time I went for an anti-natal appointment I was asked
to confirm that I was over 16 although I was actually double of that
number. M14 is however not that unusual. Figures out this week
demonstrate that the UK can still top the charts for something in these
economically tough times. The domain where Britain stubbornly can still
lay claim to be the fairest of them all is teenage pregnancy – a
dubious distinction. The reasons are multiple, as should the solutions
be.