With just over a month to go until the European elections on June 4^th, the Electoral Commission has launched a voter registration campaign which includes this advert, currently being shown on prime-time TV.

It’s a great start, and will hopefully raise awareness about the elections, which traditionally suffer from very low turnout (in 2004, turnout was less than 40 per cent). What the advert doesn’t make clear enough, however, is the danger of not voting. Low turnout means that fringe parties, including the BNP, are in with a real chance of winning seats in some regions and representing us in Europe.

The EU suffers from an ambivalent and, at times, hostile, press in Britain. Yet decisions made in Brussels have a very real impact on all of our lives – registering to vote and ensuring that it is credible politicians who are making these decisions is the least we can do.

The Hackney branch of Stop the War continue to protest every fortnight about the opening of an army recruitment centre in Dalston Kingsland shopping centre, which I reported on for the Hackney Post last month.

Here again is Lieutenant Colonel Paul Meldon speaking to defend the centre.

PR Week’s ‘Regional PR’ supplement included an interesting article this week on the growing importance of community-focused microsites in British media.

ABC have now started tracking user numbers to local news websites, such as Newcastle’s ‘Journal Live’, which runs 22 microsites for specific towns and communities in the area. The ABC results show that local microsites are netting impressive totals of up to 270,000 users/month.

Indeed, the website our City University journalism class set up to cover news in Hackney achieved more than 4,000 hits after just a week. Demand for local news clearly still exists, even if demand for local newspapers doesn’t.

Yet whilst it is encouraging to see that the web is becoming a growth area for local journalism, a sustainable business model is desperately needed if microsites are to survive.

There are two possible solutions. Microsites either need to become more commercially-savvy, and prove to businesses that they are a viable way of reaching specific local and demographic communities. The danger with this is that including too much advertising on online news sites is a big turn-off to readers.

Alternatively, microsites could gain funding through collaboration with local Councils – PR Week reports that Newcastle City Council director of communications is considering investing in Journal Live as an alternative to the council’s own website. Of course, microsites would have to ensure that this type of arrangement would not affect their editorial independence.  

If microsites can develop a solid business model, the future for local journalism looks brighter than the recent spate of closures and redundancies at local newspapers suggests.

Cindy is a 38-year-old divorced mother of three. She supports her family singlehandedly and describes herself as a successful businesswoman.                                                                                   

But Cindy’s ‘business’ could come under threat if the 2009 Policing and Crime Bill passes later this year. She works as a prostitute from a small North London premises, and worries that she may be forced out of the relative safety of the brothel and onto the streets under the proposed bill, which extends closure orders to sex-work establishments.

The bill, which could become law within months, has proved extremely contentious. As well as the extension of closure orders – which were originally designed to deal with crack houses – it creates a new offence of paying for sex with a person ‘controlled for gain,’ punishable with a fine of up to £1,000, and provisions to reclassify lap-dancing venues as ’sex-encounter’ establishments.

The Home Office argue that the bill, championed by Home Secretary Jacqui Smith, will cut demand in the sex industry and help to reduce the trafficking of women to work as prostitutes in Britain.

But many prostitutes like Cindy believe that it would further stigmatise sex-work and make their lives more dangerous. “Forcing brothels to close would push prostitution further underground and we will have to take more risks to get work,” says Cindy. “I have lots of repeat clients who I have built up trust with, and criminalisation will scare these men away.”

The English Collective of Prostitutes says that women will face much greater risks if the bill passes.  Since the clients of sex workers were criminalised in Scotland in October 2007, they say, the number of assaults on prostitutes has soared, with 126 attacks on prostitute women reported to one project in 2007, compared to 66 in 2006.

English Collective of Prostitutes protest

And according to Allan Gibson, head of the anti-trafficking unit at the Metropolitan police, criminalising clients would be very difficult to enforce because it is hard to know whether sex workers are actually ‘controlled for gain’ by a third party, or not.

Harriet Harman, Minister for Women and Equality, claims that 85 per cent of women prostitutes in Britain are ‘controlled’ by pimps or traffickers, based on ‘anecdotal’ evidence, but the Collective say that this figure is hugely exaggerated. What is more, they say, it could lead to workers in the sex industry being falsely labelled as traffickers.

“The bill means that any sex worker who receives any kind of help could be considered to be controlled for gain,” says Sarah Walker, a campaigner for the Collective. “Women working from premises often have a co-worker or receptionist looking after their safety, and they could be prosecuted under this legislation.”

The Home Office claim that the legislation would not be used against receptionists or security guards working with sex-workers, and that the clauses referring to ‘controlling for gain’ are focused on deterring the clients of prostitutes rather than traffickers.

The Collective are not convinced. Sarah cites the case of 45-year-old Tina, a Brazilian woman who set up a small massage parlour in Manchester. Tina was convicted of trafficking and jailed for three years in 2005, despite the fact that the judge in the case accepted that all of the women working in her establishment had willingly consented to work there and had been treated well.

“Trafficking law in Britain does not require proof of coercion, just evidence that you helped someone come into the UK who is now working in the sex industry,” explains Sarah. “There are women who have been trafficked into the sex industry in horrible ways but the bill will not help them because it further stigmatises prostitution. More importantly, the bill does not include any resources or money to help these women to leave the sex work industry.”

Politicians are divided over the prostitution clauses in the bill. During the bill’s committee stage Liberal Democrat Evan Harris said that the move could “drive prostitution further underground,” and make it more difficult to help the women involved. Liberal Democrat shadow Home Secretary Chris Huhne also pointed out that the “unintended consequence” of similar laws in Finland was a “booming” internet prostitution industry.

But former Labour Home Office minister Fiona Mactaggart said that the bill does not go far enough, and is campaigning for an outright ban on prostitution instead.

As the bill goes into its final stages, the Collective has vowed to fight all of these clauses along the way. “Women like Cindy and Tina are just trying to make enough money to live on, and if you criminalise clients you also criminalise the women,” says Sarah. “We don’t glorify or glamorise prostitution, but if women are doing sex work they deserve the same human and legal rights as anyone else. We will do everything we can to challenge the bill.”

 More information about the Collective’s campaign can be found at www.prostitutescollective.net

Hitchcock's thriller

Paul Iredale describes the day he was shot and injured by communist guerrillas as one of the luckiest days of his life.

The former Reuters chief had just arrived in El Salvador to cover the tail end of the Central American wars. Guerrilla troops had launched a last-ditch offensive to overthrow the Government and, in November 1989, they were fighting for control of the capital, San Salvador.

He was on his way to open the Reuters office when they opened fire on his car. “One of the bullets came through the side of the car and splayed into the metal part of the seat I was sitting on, so I got lots of metal in my side. Apart from that, none of the bullets hit me. My hat was on the seat next to me and a bullet went right through it. I was very, very lucky that day.

“But I had a white shirt on and, when I looked down at my side, it was starting to go red. I knew I had to get out of that car.”

Lying next to the car, Iredale noticed that one of the fuel lines had been hit, and that petrol was leaking onto the ground next to the car, so he rolled into a ditch by the side of the road and crawled back down the hill.

At over 6ft tall, with a shock of white hair and an unruly beard, it is hard now to imagine Iredale being able to sneak away unnoticed.

Yet with 35 years of experience as a foreign correspondent, including stints in South Africa during apartheid, South America, India and Yugoslavia during the Yugoslav Wars, Iredale, now 58, has had an action-packed career. Just four weeks after his car came under fire in San Salvador, he – along with four other journalists and six businessmen – was taken hostage during the United States invasion of Panama.

“When the invasion started I was in my hotel room. I came out to find a guy wearing a balaclava and holding an AK-47. We were shoved into a truck and driven away from the hotel and out of town. They said to us that they [the Americans] are killing our people, so we are going to kill you – and I didn’t have any reason to doubt them.”

But Iredale had a fortunate escape that time as well.

 ”After about 4 hours the guy holding us got a telephone call. Then, for some reason, they bundled us back into the truck they had taken us in and dumped us on a road.”

Iredale admits that he was terrified at the time. But he laughs heartily now as he recounts these brushes with death. Travel and adventure, he says, are what he has thrived on ever since was young – ever since he and his mother moved to Malaya to join his step-father, who was working there as a rubber-planter.

Yet he is more modest when it comes to talking about his journalistic achievements, which include interviewing Mother Theresa and Desmond Tutu.

Inevitably, Iredale has seen some disturbing scenes, such as injured and dying children, in the conflict zones where he has worked. But to be a reporter covering conflicts, he says, you have to be able to just get on with the job.

And his down-to-earth attitude means that he doesn’t give post-traumatic stress disorder much pause for thought either. “I’m prepared to accept that some people suffer from it, but there was a time when people went overboard with it and thought that everybody who covered conflicts was going to have it,” he says.

“I probably drink more than is good for me and I used to smoke like a chimney. But I could have been doing that whether I was working in a particularly stressful job or not,” he says.

Perhaps one of the things that helped Iredale to cope with the emotional strain of his job is that his wife and three young children travelled with him to most of the countries he worked in.

He admits, however, that this put a strain on his family at times and, when his children got older, his wife told him that they simply couldn’t continue moving around so much.

Iredale is now based in Britain and teaches safety courses to journalists as part of the Reuters Foundation. “Over a hundred journalists are killed every year, and during my time I’ve lost a number of friends and colleagues,” he says.  In fact, the day before he was shot in San Salvador, Iredale was at the wake of David Blundy, a friend who had been killed by snipers.

But the former correspondent clearly misses being in the thick of the action, dodging bullets and hopping from country to country. As a memento, he has kept the hat he was wearing that day, twenty years ago, in San Salvador. “I actually claimed for it on expenses and got $70 from Reuters for it – it was quite a nice hat so I was pretty annoyed when a bullet went through it,” he says, chuckling.

Jo Swinson, Britain’s youngest MP, e-mails me back instantly when I contact her to arrange an interview. Either, I think, she must be incredibly efficient or she has too much time on her hands.

But by the time I meet her at the end of the week, the 29-year-old has already appeared on Question Time, led a debate in Parliament on tax credits, and seen the results of her hard work pay-off to force the Government to reverse its position on the publication of MP’s expenses. And this, it seems, is just a normal week’s work for Liberal Democrat Swinson, who is MP for East Dunbartonshire – the constituency where she grew up. In fact, I later find out, the Mail on Sunday reported in January that she was the ‘most active’ Scottish MP in Westminster during 2008, having spoken 58 times in debates and having submitted 220 written questions.

In her cramped office in the eaves of 1 Parliament Street, Swinson signs a stack of letters to new voters in her constituency as she talks about her achievements as the youngest MP in Westminster – a role colloquially known as the ‘Baby of the House.’

“You need to be determined to get into politics. It’s hard to get elected and it’s hard to stay elected,” she says. Indeed, although Swinson was only 25 when she was elected in 2005, she had already stood unsuccessfully twice – in Hull East in the 2001 General Election, where she gained a 6% swing from John Prescott, then-deputy leader of the Labour Party, and in Strathkelvin and Bearsden in the 2003 Scottish Parliamentery election, where she came third. Since being elected in 2005 she has acted as the Liberal Democrat’s Shadow Scotland Secretary and Shadow Spokeswoman for Women and Equality and, at the start of this year, she was appointed to the role of Shadow Minister for Foreign Affairs.

But Swinson’s first forays into politics were as a student at the London School of Economics, as president of her halls of residence committee and a member of the Liberal Democrat Youth and Students organisation (now Liberal Youth), where she played an instrumental role in campaigning to scrap tuition fees.

“I argued for that policy as a student in the Liberal Democrats when it wasn’t universally popular in the party. But we won the argument and it became party policy. Then seeing the Liberal Democrats getting into coalition Government in Scotland and putting it into practice proved to me that it is really possible to make a difference. Students from my constituency now don’t have to pay tuition fees if they go to a Scottish University.”

As for tuition fees at English Universities and for English students attending Scottish Universities, Swinson says that abolishing these will be a policy in the Liberal Democrat manifesto at the next election.

“I dread to think what kind of debts people are graduating with these days, especially with top-up fees. If we are in Government we will be able to put this policy into practice, and if not we will argue for it. Obviously, the more Liberal Democrat MPs we have, the more likely it is to happen – in Scotland we managed to get it through without actually being the largest party.”

And, although she is vague on details, she says that her party will also be pressurising the Government to do more to help this year’s ‘credit crunch graduates’.

“The Government are not doing enough, and I really feel for graduates at the moment. It is hard to get jobs without work experience, so an internship scheme like the one that is being suggested could be very positive in that way. But, at the moment, it only seems to include big businesses, so maybe it should be wider – small businesses need new talent as much as the multinationals do.”

Perhaps unsurprisingly as the youngest MP, Swinson believes that the political system desperately needs modernisation – she advocates lowering the voting age to 16, now an official Liberal Democrat policy, and would like to see the House of Lords overhauled to make it an elected body.

 Most crucially, however, she wants the political system to revamp its image – to become both more accountable and more accessible to the public. To this end, she has launched a campaign to overturn the ban imposed by Parliamentary authorities on posting footage on YouTube or other video streaming sites: ‘Axe the Parliamentary YouTube ban.’

“In the 21^st Century I think that it is ridiculous you are not allowed to post clips of Parliament on YouTube, because that is the way that most young people would probably watch Parliament. If it was in bite-sized form people could share clips and rate them.

“This is just one example of why Parliament has a traditional and stuffy image. But it shouldn’t have – we are discussing issues that lots of people care about, so why don’t we just make sure that we are doing it in an accessible way?”

Swinson’s grasp of new media also played a crucial role in her recent campaign to force the Government to abolish its plan to exempt MPs’ expenses from the Freedom of Information Act, for which she tabled a Parliamentary Motion – read more in this blog’s previous post.

Yet despite the success of her campaigning work and the positions of responsibility she has held, Swinson says she says she experienced ageism in her early days in Parliament.

“I remember once on the floor of the House when I asked a question about the lower minimum wage for young people and the Scottish Minister heckled me, saying ‘Are you one of them?’ It wasn’t particularly funny, but it was particularly ironic given that it happened the week after the Government had brought in age discrimination legislation.”

But anyone who might have thought that Swinson’s youth meant that she would not be up to the challenges of her job has underestimated her determination and her passion for the issues. “The number one thing you need to succeed in politics is that you have to care – you just have to give a damn.” And it would be hard for anyone to accuse Scotland’s ‘most active’ MP in Westminster of not fulfilling this requirement of the job description.

 It is certainly a sign of the times when even BBC Radio Four presenters are talking about FaceBook and Twitter on the Today programme.

Yesterday, however, on the 5^th Birthday of the now-iconic site, which was set up by Mark Zuckerberg from his dorm room at Harvard, the programme discussed how social networking sites have so rapidly become a part of our everyday lives.

But in addition to the social aspect of these sites, they are also becoming increasingly important as a tool for political campaigning and protest.

Jo Swinson, Britain's youngest MP

Much has been made of the use that Barack Obama made of social networking sites during the election campaign. Some British politicians, however, are not far behind; Liberal Democrat MP Jo Swinson is a regular Tweeter, and she partially attributes the Government’s recent U-Turn on the publication of detailed breakdowns of MPs expenses, for which she tabled a Parliamentary motion, to the use of social networking sites. Over 7,000 people joined the FaceBook group and thousands who heard about this story through FaceBook and Twitter sent e-mails to MPs, forcing the Government to abolish its plan to exempt MPs’ expenses from the Freedom of Information Act.

Conservative blogger Iain Dale called it “the first real victory for an online political campaign in this country”, whilst the founder of campaign group mySociety, Tom Steinberg, said: “This is a huge victory not just for transparency; it’s a bellwether for a change in the way politics works. There’s no such thing as a good day to bury bad news any more, the internet has seen to that.”

Most dramatic is the speed at which the campaign gathered momentum. According to Peter Facey, director of Unlock Democracy, the campaign that was mounted in just a few hours would have taken weeks 10 years ago. There’s a great article on what happened by Mike Lowe here.

And internet-savvy Swinson is not stopping there. When I interviewed her yesterday she also said that she would like to make  clips of Parliament available on YouTube – with the dual purpose of getting more young people interested in politics and of making the political system more transparent and accessible. She may have a battle on her hands for this one though – even though some European Parliamentary debates are on YouTube, she suspects she will first need to explain to many of her older colleagues in Westminster what the site actually is… See below for YouTube video of Finnish MEP Alexander Stubbs arguing in the European Parliament for “equal treatment for Vodka”.

One of the main reasons that many people embark on a career in journalism is the desire to hold Governments and big business to account. The Sunday Times undercover reporters who revealed in this article that four Labour Peers would be prepared to amend bills in return for hefty cash sums did exactly this, and their work is an affirmation of the important role that journalism plays as the ‘fourth estate.’

Jeffrey Archer is a life Peer despite having served time for perverting the course of justice

The four Peers in question deny wrongdoing and will be tried in a few weeks, facing possible suspension if found guilty of accepting cash for influence. Yet the real significance of this piece of journalism is that it has highlighted clearly the need for reform in the House of Lords and for more checks and balances on the power of Peers, who currently hold their titles for life – no matter how grave their crime. Peers are currently allowed to act as ‘consultants’, as long as their work does not influence their decisions in the House – a grey area which most certainly needs to be made more transparent.

Whilst the Sunday Times has faced some criticism for the ‘deception and attempted entrapment’ undertaken by its journalists, it is sadly the case that underhand methods are sometimes necessary to discover the underhand practices of those in power.

Last week, I had to make the most difficult phone call I have ever had to make.

“I’m sorry to have to ask you this, but I’m calling from The Scotsman and we understand that someone by this surname was killed in a car crash on the M8 last night. Was it a relative of yours?”

“Yes, it was my cousin.”

“I’m really sorry to hear that and want to offer you my condolences on behalf of The Scotsman. We would like to put an article about the car crash, paying tribute to your cousin, in tomorrow’s paper. Would you or any other relatives be able to talk to me for the article?”

The family did agree to talk, and the parents of the deceased spoke to a colleague of mine. This is the final article we produced:

http://thescotsman.scotsman.com/scotland/Tycoon-25–killed-.4883448.jp

Although making this call felt slightly intrusive into the privacy of a grieving family, it also gave the family a chance to have the final word about their son in a national newspaper. And, as my colleague pointed out, it can be comforting at times like this for families to know that the wider community is interested and cares about such a death.

The Gallardo

The crash was, moreover, particularly newsworthy because the car involved was a Lamborghini Gallardo. Although focussed on the tragic loss suffered by one family, the article also highlighted the potential dangers of super cars (the Gallardo has a V-10 engine and can reach 60mph from a standing start in 3.9 seconds) and the dangers of speeding (the Police could not confirm the speed that the car was travelling but the Gallardo has a top speed of 196mph).

Intruding into people’s privacy is part of the job in journalism. The key to doing this with integrity, according to my colleagues at The Scotsman, is being respectful and understanding of their circumstances, even when your editor is threatening to drop the article if you don’t get a key quote from a member of the family for a piece.

 As a 2008 graduate now undertaking a journalism course, graduate unemployment is an issue that is incredibly worrying to me and to many of my friends.  After spending huge amounts of time and money getting a good degree, it seems that  some graduates of 2008 and 2009 will be questioning whether their investment was worth it.

Many large graduate employers are reducing the number of places on their graduate schemes and competition for jobs less affected by the economic downturn – such as teaching and law – has increased dramatically. What is more, graduates will now have to compete for jobs with highly-skilled and experienced workers who have been laid-off in other sectors.

I investigated the problem of graduate unemployment in more detail for a recent article for The Scotsman. http://thescotsman.scotsman.com/topstories/Slump-in-graduate-jobs-39is.4864395.jp

Whilst it seems that many people realise that graduate unemployment is a latent issue – which will potentially explode when this years’ graduates leave university in the summer - no-one really knows how to tackle it.

The national internship scheme proposed by the Government last week may go some way towards temporarily alleviating  graduate unemployment, but it is only a stop-gap solution – the proposed internships that will be offered to graduates are only for three months.

It is understandable that companies want to save on the cost of expensive graduate training schemes. On the other hand, talent and innovation are crucial for businesses in order to get through the current economic climate.

As for students, the advice of Professor Nicholas Terry, vice-principal of Abertay University, who I spoke to for my article, gives some hope.

He said: “Students about to graduate are having to adjust their expectations, but this shouldn’t come at the expense of their career ambitions. Most students are mature enough to realise they’ll simply have to adjust to labour market conditions when they graduate. My advice to students who are graduating in 2009 is, firstly, think long-term. Their careers are going to last a lot longer than the financial downturn, so keep some perspective on the matter.”