The Times Op-Ed: A guide to electionspeak

By David Rowan

YOU THINK you've had to endure a mind-numbing campaign? Imagine having to sit through every tedious news conference and artlessly contrived photo-op. For the technicians at the BBC's Parliament channel, it must have been particularly gruelling, the schedule starting with the 6am Election 2005 Campaign show, switching at 7.30am to Live Party Campaign News Conferences, and then back to more of those exciting campaign hot-spots until early the next morning.

So it's understandable that the channel's inmates have maintained their sanity by devising a game they call Election Cliché Bingo. To play, the techies have been passing round bingo cards packed with the most overused buzzwords. The winner is the player who can tick off the most uttered by candidates during a single shift. The cards may be just a bit of fun - but they do provide a rather effective précis of the campaign's linguistic low points.

These are some of the phrases to listen out for. Start with the hard-working families or the forgotten majority, who you will find up and down the country, but preferably in Middle England, far from the metropolitan elite. They will be promised services at the point of need, based on sound economic policies rather than a postcode lottery. To prove the point, candidates will promise to engage with real people, particularly the ordinary man in the street, who, let's make it perfectly clear, will be empowered by promises of delivery and unprecedented levels of investment. As for the other parties, their sums don't add up.

You think we're exaggerating? During Thursday's round of morning news conferences, the techies kept score of the most frequently occurring buzzwords. Stability came top, blurted out by candidates 17 times, followed by trust (nine times), I believe (seven) and the inevitable WMD (six times, twice as many as illegal war). And that's before you add all the synonyms for the word liar.

If you want to play this at home, we recommend that you include all those euphemisms for foreigners: all that talk of newcomers or simply illegals, who remain a threat to Britain's forgotten majority until controlled immigration renders our borders secure. You will also want to include the fearsome yobs who dominate Michael Howard's speeches.

As for Labour's buzzwords, here is a new one that you may wish to add to your game card. Boom, party spin-doctors explained last week, is a street-slang term signifying delight and approval. Funnily enough, when journalists heard the term chanted by pupils at the Lilian Baylis School, South London, last Tuesday - just as Tony Blair was arriving for a visit - they were convinced that the jeering kids were actually shouting "Boo!". Now, what was it Orwell said about politics and the English language?

(The Times Comment page, April 30 2005)

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Trendsurfing: Corporate trendspotters (The Times)

By David Rowan

Uh-oh: we seem to have competition. After eight months devotedly sorting the buzz from the fads, we had assumed that a weekly glance at Trendsurfing was all a corporate futurist would need to plan ahead. But now, we discover, there's a growing army of in-house trendspotters paid simply to stare past the office photocopier into the blue sky ahead. Even Hallmark Cards, for goodness' sake, employs a company "trendsetter" to "monitor the social milieu".

It does all sound rather grand. Whereas this column relies unfashionably on talking to people, meeting them, and acting on tips from our insightful readership, the chief trends expert at Hallmark gets to "synthesise her observations, expertise and experience to evaluate the strength and importance of cultural movement". Marita Wesely-Clough, we are informed, "reads virtually every new book and article" on social change, "tries to refute it or take it to the next level in her own mind", and then hangs out down at the shops, "scrutinising language, dress, colour preferences and media to add to her repertoire of filters". All that to help the public say Happy Mother's Day?

Actually, behind Ms Wesely-Clough's coma-inducing jargon there lie some fascinating insights. Take her newest report, "Evolving Trends and Countertrends for 2005 and Beyond". Cut away all her "shifting paradigms", and you're left with some lively ideas:

Aspirational luxury: we're too sophisticated nowadays to be "ordinary" consumers. We'll pay over the odds to distinguish ourselves through what we buy, so the growth opportunities lie in offering personalised cars, suits or holidays. "Handcrafted and customised, or rare, almost museum-quality super luxe items will be in greater demand," Wesely-Clough predicts.

China's next cultural revolution: with China the world's newest economic powerhouse, expect an Eastern influence in everything from financial markets to manufacturing processes.

New pressures promoting social conformity: in our fast-paced, media-saturated culture, too much genuine choice may threaten the status quo. Wesely-Clough identifies a growing "singlemindedness" within politics and commerce to "suppress diversity of thought outside the norm or stamp out the spark that could ignite radical thinking". She calls it the "push for mono-mind", which must impress the clients no end. At least with this column you get editors who remove that sort of guff.

A loss of national empathy: it's no great surprise that the internet and television have eroded perceptions of distance. Now, the woman from Hallmark says, the process is affecting our emotional life. We feel genuine excitement when conjoined twins are separated thousands of miles away; we grieve when strangers in Asia are killed in a tsunami. "What once was family is now public, national and global," she concludes.

Neurotic isolation: with terrifying headlines a mouse-click away, some of us will respond with "a pervasive paranoia" and shut ourselves away. An entire demographic, she suggests, will be left "feeling like an exposed nerve that no longer can function".

Still, there's bound to be an opportunity here for Hallmark. "Sorry to Hear About Your Pervasive Paranoia" cards, anyone?

(The Times Magazine, April 30 2005)

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Interview: David Dimbleby, BBC Question Time (Evening Standard)

By David Rowan

DAVID Dimbleby is hoping for a "visceral" confrontation tomorrow night. For the first time, the three main party leaders will submit to a live Question Time inquisition on BBC1 at 8.30pm - not the head-to-head debate he had wanted, admittedly, but still 90 minutes, one after the other, in front of an unpredictable studio audience.

"They've arranged to come on and off without meeting each other," Dimbleby explains with a boyish grin. "So it's not going to be, 'Good luck, hope it goes well, good on ya ...'"

Still, considering that in 2001 it took three separate editions to entice the party leaders, this, he accepts, is a step in the right direction. "Though it would be a big service to the electorate, to politics in general, if they were to debate head-to-head," he adds. "The old argument was, 'Oh, we don't have presidential elections.' Well, watch the television over the past couple of weeks and it's clear a very large part of our election now is choosing our prime minister. Apart from the leaders, how often do you see all the other people? You can't do that in your politicking and then say it's inappropriate to debate head-tohead because we don't have a presidential system."

As the BBC's unofficial custodian of great national events, Dimbleby, 66, is in his element at election time. Sitting in the office where he has been busily preparing to lead election-night coverage, he is clearly fired up by an otherwise uninspiring campaign, chuckling, giggling, contriving exaggeratedly actorish expressions. Having lost out to Michael Grade to be BBC chairman, he remains, he makes clear, on his best behaviour, deflecting questions whenever a frank response might embarrass the regime. Still, his reputation for speaking his mind doesn't quite elude him - even if his main concern today is Labour's apparent evasion of both voters and the media.

"I do think it's very strange the way the campaign has been conducted, and the refusal to say where the party leaders - or rather the Prime Minister - is going [whenever a photo-call is planned]," he says. "It makes it all the more important that Question Time is genuinely 'candidates meet the public' and not 'candidates meet a few close friends and voters who already support them'.

"There have been occasions when Tony Blair has chosen to face an audience of 'enemy women' because of this extraordinary Freudian-masochism-gestalt-therapy theory about how to conduct a personal campaign, through which you apologise and so 'free everybody up' to vote for you again." Tomorrow's Question Time audience, by contrast, will be far more representative of the electorate.

THE programme, Dimbleby insists, "does democracy a great service". Yet Cabinet ministers, from Gordon Brown to Jack Straw, have for years refused to appear - even though turning up would be "the right thing to do". He bangs the table. "The message we get back is that their advisers say there's nothing in it for them. They mean that the attacks on the Government in their view become unfair and too fierce. But actually, that is what government is about. You ought to go on fighting your corner, not just in the Commons, not just in onetoone interviews. I think it's a great pity that they don't."

Could the aggressive Paxman-Humphrys style of political interviewing be partly to blame? After all, didn't Jon Snow complain last week that "lack of deference has gone too far on British television"? Dimbleby smiles and neatly sidesteps a minefield. "I believe in a catholicity of approaches to politicians and interviewing," he says deliberately. He relaxes a little. "Look, you can't invent a way of interviewing that isn't true to your character. It's not phoney, interviewing, it's a serious way of trying to elicit information and get at the truth. Sometimes things are revealed by questions repeated 20 times, sometimes, actually, they're even revealed by the soft sofa interview - by which I don't mean David Frost but the afternoon shows."

He quickly qualifies himself. "Though there is a danger, of course, that if the broadcasting organisations offer the softer interviews, there's a terrible temptation for politicians to take them and avoid the tougher stuff."

Dimbleby, though freelance, is the classic BBC lifer. He began at BBC Bristol in 1960, succeeded his father Richard in 1974 as presenter of Panorama, and moved to Question Time 11 years ago. Having sold his family's local-newspaper business four years ago to Newsquest, for a reported £12 million, he clearly has little need to work to support his family (he has a son with his second wife, Belinda Giles, as well as three children by his first wife Josceline).

So having applied twice to be the BBC's chairman, and once to be director-general, the big question-is what Dimbleby does next. "Well, I carry on very happily being a broadcaster, Question Time goes on, and I'm doing a series which comes out in June called A Picture of Britain," he says. "I'm having a ball. And no, I'm not going to apply to be chairman again, nor to be director-general. It's always been a long shot, and once it's over, I don't regret it. But all my ambitions to take over the BBC in that way have gone."

HE HAS previously spoken out against the "terrible error" of keeping Panorama on Sunday nights, and of the BBC's "crazy" ratings obsession. What, then, would he have done had he become chairman? He will not say, as "it would be unfair on the new gang". So he'd change nothing about BBC News and Current Affairs? He laughs. "You can't assume that from my answer. Ha ha ... But I'm tacit now. And the mood has changed, things are improving."

He is cheered by signs that ratings are becoming less of a goal. "It won't be easy," he says. "It's the old oil tanker, isn't it? But it's the change of attitude that matters in the BBC. It's a funny organisation. It's really hidden anarchy. Every producer, every editor has strong ideas of what they want to do. But equally they have to respond to the signals that come down, which get interpreted differently.

"But there's certainly a move away from so-called reality shows and BBC2 doing its 'how's your garden' stuff," he adds cheerily, "to something sli-ii-ghtly more interesting and revealing." So he won't be watching Celebrity Big Brother, then. "I always watch Celebrity Big Brother," he says. "Bits of it. Not lots." Another laugh.

As for that other reality contest next week, he promises a "hugely entertaining" election-night programme, put together by a team of 800. ITV, by contrast, is taking an avowedly glitzier approach, with a body-language analyst and celebrities such as Kevin Spacey and Richard Branson invited to a riverboat party. Dimbleby sounds unimpressed. "They've got Jonathan Dimbleby, what do they need Kevin Spacey for?" he splutters.

Ah, his little brother. Won't there be an element of fraternal competition? "He's my brother! How could we compete on election night?" he responds. "No, there isn't, actually. We deliberately don't talk to each other about what we're doing. Only my mother sees us both, and she certainly doesn't have a favourite. She has two television sets, and two remotes, and when she sees a mouth move on one, she flicks to hear what we're saying."

Still, doesn't he find it odd to have two Dimblebies interpreting the national will? After all, Jeremy Paxman once wryly remarked that "it's part of the constitution of this country that all events have to be presented by a Dimbleby".

"I don't think he meant that," Dimbleby replies. "It was just a bad hair day." He laughs once more. "I'm just a jobbing broadcaster who happens to be called Dimbleby, that's all. Nothing to it."

(Evening Standard, April 27 2005)

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Trendsurfing: Biblical diets (The Times)

By David Rowan

Diet not going too well? Maybe you're putting your faith in the wrong book. It's taken a few thousand years, but suddenly diets based on biblical teachings are hot. With names like the Hallelujah Diet and the Maker's Diet, these scripture-inspired regimes are attracting a growing following among evangelical Christians and anyone else looking for miraculous ways to shed the pounds. In the US, this has led to a pile of best-selling books, with such delicious titles as What Would Jesus Eat?, Slim for Him, and - wait for it - Moses Wasn't Fat. Although after 40 years wandering around the desert, you too would get into a size eight.

The goal is to take true believers on a path of nutritional righteousness. Some begin with Genesis 1:29, in which God brings the Israelites their menu: "Behold, I have given you every herb bearing seed, which is upon the face of all the Earth, and every tree, in the which is the fruit of a tree yielding seed; to you it shall be for meat." In other words, stick to fruit, vegetables, nuts and seeds. Others take a more carnivorous interpretation, noting that later in the book the Lord suggests that "every moving thing that liveth shall be meat for you". Or, if the New Testament is more your scene, you might choose only food available in Jesus's time. Think goats' milk rather than double frappuccinos.

Sure enough, this emerging field has already produced its own gurus, offering not merely dietary advice, but also the nicely profitable supplements to accompany it. The Dr Atkins of biblical diets would probably be George Malkmus, a self-proclaimed "Reverend" whose Hallelujah Diet claims to be "biblically based, scientifically validated, personally evidenced".

Malkmus rejects all animal products apart from honey, advising that you stick to raw fruit and vegetables, which he claims healed his own colon cancer. Medical records testifying to this miracle cure have proved strangely elusive, but Malkmus carries on selling his supplements and seminars. After all, as he points out, raw foodists in the Bible could expect to live for 912 years - whereas after the flood, when they started cooking, that dropped to a mere 110. So who wouldn't want to munch a few raw sunflower seeds?

Equally controversial is another best-selling author, Jordan S Rubin, whose book, The Maker's Diet, requires a 40-day journey which includes regular fast days. Rubin takes his cue from Leviticus, warning against Malkmus's raw food, and instead urging meat and dairy. Honey is in (after all, the Promised Land was full of it along with the milk), and whereas wild salmon is fine, the farmed version is "contrary to the Maker's design". It goes without saying that Rubin underwent his own mystical experience, in his case finding the diet cured his Crohn's disease. Are you starting to see a pattern here?

It has not dented the vast profits of Rubin's business that US food regulators have condemned his supplements' unsubstantiated health claims, or that critics have questioned his non-accredited academic qualifications. Nor has Malkmus suffered from similar censure of "false statements" for the products he sells, or from nutritionists' claims that his Hallelujah Diet is unbalanced and can cause serious deficiencies. The faithful, after all, believe in a higher truth - even if they have to munch packs of Bible Granola to attain it.

(The Times Magazine, April 23 2005)

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The Times Op-Ed: A guide to electionspeak

By David Rowan

DO YOU speak poll-ish? While the politicians struggle tediously to out-euphemise each other on immigration, the opinion pollsters in this campaign have all the best lines. Let the candidates contrive ever more bogus synonyms for "race": the freshest linguistic creations this time round are being coined by the forecasters.

With all their talk of drawbridge issues and tactical unwinds, the number crunchers' slang is proving unusually revealing. For one thing, Bashful Blairities have replaced Shy Tories as the voting group the pollsters find hardest to fathom. Suddenly embarrassed to admit that they might vote Labour, they are keeping to themselves their guilty secret. "It's what we call the spiral of silence theory," explains Nick Sparrow at ICM. "Because your party is so unpopular, you're more inclined to keep quiet, which we're finding more now among Labour voters than Conservatives."

A further Labour challenge lies in evidence of tactical unwind - the tendency, named by the psephologist John Curtice, for those previously voting tactically against a Conservative candidate to abstain this time or switch away from Labour. Then again, there is always the Palmer paradox to consider, an aspect of voters' psychology articulated by Nick Palmer, defending Broxtowe for Labour. If it appears that the Conservatives might win, Palmer asserts, disaffected Labour voters will turn out in force to prevent them. But if the Tories are generally assumed to be sunk, apathy might actually let them win.

The Palmer paradox has been much discussed this week on the PoliticalBetting.com website, as has another factor that may shift the election odds, the GMWs. These, if you didn't already know, are the Guardian Men and Women, supposedly former Labour voters now liable to go Lib Dems. Don't confuse them, by the way, with the thwarted idealists or the grousers, distinct groups identified by MORI as particularly significant. The former comprise former Labourites who may simply stay at home, the latter "grumpy southerners who tend to moan about everything" but could turn a few key marginals.

It is not all bad news for Labour, which has benefited substantially from twizzling in recent days. Here, you have to understand that national ignominy has only boosted the sales of Turkey Twizzlers. As one Labour candidate explained yesterday, "The more befuddled we are, the better we seem to be doing. It's great."

Can these linguistic insights alone help to predict the May 5 result? Probably not, given all the dog-whistling and campaign re-engineering still to come. But it might, at least, help the parties to sort out their priorities, suggests Simon Atkinson of MORI. "Labour's thwarted idealists need to be galvanised to stop the tactical unwind by promoting the nose-peg vote," he says. If you know what he means.

(The Times, April 23 2005)

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The Times: Be your own election forecaster

By David Rowan

EVER fancied yourself as an informed election forecaster? This year, thanks to the internet, all the tools you need are just a mouse-click away. From spread-betting markets to poll-crunching programs, an avalanche of online data lets you monitor voting intentions as never before.

2005 will be remembered as Britain's first bloggers' election, but it has also empowered a nation of amateur psephologists. To see why, log on to http://PoliticalBetting.com, a buzzing resource aimed at political gamblers.

Punters are staking millions of pounds on election bets and it is only natural for them to want continually to hone their research. So they can thank Mike Smithson, a former BBC journalist and Liberal Democrat councillor, for creating a site that obsessively tracks where they are putting their money. Using voting projections from the main spread-betting sites, Smithson creates daily "balance of money" predictions that are at least as compelling as conventional polls.

Last night, his survey of the betting markets had Labour's share of the vote at 37.4 per cent, the Conservatives' at 34.1 per cent, and the LibDems' at 21.6 per cent. And all, remember, based on hard cash rather than an interviewee's possibly dishonest response to a pollster. You can also research the parties' standing, and that of individual candidates, by going directly to the sites of spread-betting firms such as IG Index (www.igsport.com) or Spreadfair (http://cantor.spreadfair.com). But be warned: anoraks may find it dangerously addictive to track punters' preferences in real time.

If you prefer to base your predictions on more traditional polls, then start at Polling Report (www.pollingreport.co.uk), an impressively thorough archive run by an Anthony Wells, who admits to being a Conservative supporter but lets the numbers speak for themselves. Or, if you feel daunted by the pure volume of polling data here - on everything from tax to ID cards - turn to Electoral Calculus (www.electoralcalculus.co.uk) for a simpler overview.

This site is run by Martin Baxter, who mathematically models derivatives for Nomura International in the City. He uses the same scientific analysis of polls and electoral geography to predict what would happen if the election were held tomorrow.

On current trends, based on 6,974 people's responses to various polls over a week, Mr Baxter predicts another Labour landslide, with 391 seats, compared with 172 for the Conservatives and 55 for the LibDems. Central Office may question the methodology, but as a free resource it offers an intriguing meta-analysis.

If you fancy making your own election forecasts, UK-Elect (www.ukelect.com) offers a free trial version of a number-crunching program that has been updated specifically for the current campaign. It uses recent polling data and the outcomes of past general elections to help you to determine whether Oliver Letwin will keep his seat or the prospects of a hung Parliament (minimal, the software says).

Its latest forecast is not that different from Mr Baxter's, giving Labour 368, the Conservatives 180, and the LibDems 67.

If, after all this, you are still uncertain about your own voting intentions, turn to http://TheyWorkForYou.com to put your own former MP to the test. This non-partisan, volunteer-run site mines parliamentary data to hold them to account.

But perhaps the most astute guide to individual politicians' current standing with the voting public is a free online trading game called Polidex (www.polidex.co.uk), which determines the "price" of an MP according to what others are prepared to pay.

In a shock result last night, Michael Howard, trading at £74.97 a share, had edged almost 50p ahead of Tony Blair. But what is bound to prompt a crisis meeting at No 10 this morning is news that another MP, at £82.50, is now the nation's choice. Congratulations, Gordon Brown.

(The Times, April 21 2005)

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Interview: Peter Kellner, YouGov (Evening Standard)

By David Rowan

SOME things are simply not fair. Peter Kellner, an Evening Standard political analyst until two years ago, is about to find himself almost a million pounds richer. YouGov, the implausibly named polling firm he now chairs, floats on the stock market next Monday, valued at around £18 million.

With a six per cent stake, Kellner is naturally feeling rather pleased with himself in his art-filled office overlooking Smithfield market. It's only when probed about his polls' alleged Tory bias that he turns stony-faced and threatens to sue.

"I will do fairly well out of this, I can't deny that," he admits sheepishly, adding that if his journalist friends are jealous, they have not shown it. "But though it's a large gain on paper, as a director I can't yet convert it into a Ferrari. If the company doubles in value next Tuesday, we can't simply cash in our chips and retire to the Cayman Islands." John Humphrys, too, stands to make around £250,000 from the flotation.

Still, as a career gamble it has paid off. Kellner, once Newsnight's political commentator, was brought in by the company's founders, Stephan Shakespeare and Nadhim Zahawi, who had run Jeffrey Archer's unsuccessful mayoral campaign. In May 2000, just as the internet bubble was bursting, they launched YouGov as an online-only polling firm. While critics sneered at its methods, the company accurately predicted voting in the 2001 General Election (forecasting Labour's 9.3 per cent lead as 10 per cent), the Australian election, even Pop Idol. And while corporate clients such as Asda provide its main income, it forecasts voting intentions for papers ranging from The Sun to The Daily Telegraph.

The attraction, Kellner says, is that the internet drastically cuts costs. With a traditional pollster, a typical largescale poll would cost £20,000, of which £8,000 would go on asking the questions and £9,000 on overheads, leaving £3,000 profit. "But we would charge £15,000," he says. "And there would be just £2,000 in direct costs and £7,000 in indirect costs, leaving us with £6,000 - twice the profit."

YouGov has a panel of 90,000 internet users, paid 50p for each survey. For a political poll, it emails a group deemed "representative of the country", selecting them and weighing their verdicts according to gender, age, class and region. "We also do something no other pollster does," Kellner says. "We weight by newspaper readership. I'm not saying every Sun reader is identical, but it helps ensure your sample is attitudinally representative. And with one exception, we've got elections pretty much spot on."

That exception was the last European election, an error Kellner dismisses as a mistake over where UKIP was placed on the questionnaire. Still, there remain concerns about the reliability of internet polls. The columnist Stephen Pollard claims to have fraudulently registered with YouGov under a dozen fake names. Kellner replies that security has since been tightened. "Even if Pollard had taken every poll he could have, there was just a 1 in 500 chance of him moving one figure by one percentage point," Kellner says.

Yet YouGov's results generally favour the Conservatives far more than rival pollsters'. Its latest Sunday Times survey has Labour ahead by just one point, while a Populus poll in The Times puts the gap at nine points, and Mori in the FT has the Tories eight behind.

"That happened, too, at the last three General Elections, when almost all surveys exaggerated Labour's support and understated the Conservatives'," he replies calmly. "The problem proved to be with the other pollsters. We got it about right." Conventional polls, he explains, undercount the "shy Tories", those reluctant to share their allegiance, and fail to account for Labour's lower turnout rates.

In the murky, factional world of party polling, rivals have dared to suggest that YouGov - or "Anything You Want Guv" - intentionally favours the Conservatives. Lord Bell, formerly Iain Duncan Smith's media adviser, was an early investor, they say - and Shakespeare and Zahawi have been party activists. How would Kellner respond?

"If you put that in print, we'll sue," he says, suddenly colder. "It is not true, it is plainly defamatory, and we'd have no compunction about suing."

Shakespeare, who has been working quietly elsewhere in the office, gets up to add: "And those who suggested it in the past, we have taken legal action against. It would mean we were twisting results to suit someone, which is patently crazy."

Clearly a touchy subject. In fact, Kellner's history suggests these conspiracy theories to be farfetched. Now 58, he stood for Labour in local Westminster council elections in 1978, and remains a party member. He also happens to be married to Catherine Ashton, a Labour minister in the Lords (they have a son and a daughter, and live in St Albans).

"Equally irrelevant. There is no connection between any of our political views and the results we put out. Look, a 2003 poll for the Telegraph showed how unpopular Iain Duncan Smith was with both the public and party members, yet he had hired us for internal party polls. So we were actually producing figures against the interests of one of our main clients!" Michael Howard scrapped the contract.

THE real problem is that newspapers "overinterpret" polls. "They provide a lot of knowledge, but are incapable of providing certainty. Newspapers want certainty. The mathematics of polls are identical to the mathematics of electrons. Just as when you try to map out what's happening to electrons, you get a blurred picture. It's Heisenberg's uncertainty principle."

Excuse me? "Look, we're showing Labour leads on average of three or four per cent. Some show seven per cent. But statistically that's a tiny difference, because of the two or three per cent margin of error for each party."

Does he miss newspapers? "To my surprise, I miss practically nothing," he reflects. "I'm still pursuing my interests in political analysis. The only difference is that on election day, for the first time, I'll be the one getting nervous as we wait for the results."

Although this time, envious excolleagues might point out, Kellner the millionaire cannot fail to win.

(Evening Standard, April 20 2005)

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The Times Op-Ed: A guide to electionspeak

By David Rowan

FORGET the manifestos - the linguistic front line is where the real battles are being fought. Track down the spikiest buzzwords and the most vivid neologisms, and you can neatly isolate an election's key themes. So ignore all those tedious speeches about health or crime: this campaign is all about Labour's loss of faith among its traditional supporters.

Just watch the verbal missiles fly between Labour's hard men and their left and liberal critics. With previously sympathetic columnists and bloggers turning on phoney Tony over Iraq, the Prime Minister is increasingly being addressed by the nickname Bliar. In response, Labour has been busily dismissing the whingers as dinner-party critics - the sneering shiraz quaffers, as Peter Hain sees them, lumbered with what the columnist David Aaronovitch calls their bruschetta orthodoxies.

There is one proposed solution to keep reluctant Labourites from defecting: the nose-holding vote, as promoted by John Kerry's supporters in last November's US election. Yes, the thinking goes, some of the candidate's policies might stink, but cover your nose anyway and give him your support. Polly Toynbee, the Guardian commentator, even offered this week to send the doubters wooden nose-pegs free of charge.

The Birmingham postal-voting scandal has proved a particularly fertile linguistic battleground. After the judge condemned a system that would "disgrace a banana republic", hostile bloggers have been delighting this week in renaming Labour the Banana Republicans or Zanu New Labour PF - the latter initials standing for "Postal Fraud". More likely to impress lexicographers as an enduring campaign legacy is the term vote farming, through which ballot papers are harvested by the parties for processing, perhaps placing voters under undue influence. When this happens in old people's homes, it is charmingly known as granny farming.

It is notable how militaristic the parties' campaign language has become in rcent days. Michael Howard promises to battle for Britain, repeating those old warnings about Labour's tax bombshell, and his opponents in the ground war announce a demolition day on Tory tax plans. We must now be deep into trench warfare when even Cherie Booth urges supporters to give George Galloway a bloody nose - surely a campaign role traditionally reserved for John Prescott.

Oh, and the policy issues? Education has so far cornered the market in creative buzzwords, which suggests that this is the one that matters. The Conservatives pledge to back synthetic phonics and the Lib Dems talk up positive behaviour plans for naughty children, while Gordon Brown has been loudly proclaiming Labour's schoolgate credentials.

After Cheriegate and Mittalgate, maybe he ought to choose another word.

(The Times Comment page, April 16 2005)

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Trendsurfing: Scoubidous (The Times)

By David Rowan

Pack away those Game Boys and Yu-Gi-Oh cards: the latest playground craze involves nothing more than three-foot lengths of hollowed-out plastic string. They are called Scoubidous, and in the last six months, they have quietly become the new must-haves in primary schools across southern England. Children plait them, knot them, and turn them into anything from friendship bracelets to tiny dragons. And whereas most toy trends rely largely on marketing campaigns, this one seems to have spread entirely through word of mouth.

"You make keyrings with them, braid them and tie them in your hair, or turn them into little people," explains Claudia, a seven-year-old fan at Christ Church Primary School, in north-west London. Boys, too, have caught the bug, as Claudia's classmate Daniel points out: "You hook them to your bag zipper, and make inventions with them," he says. "Everyone has them. They come in all different colours, but the sparkly ones are the best."

But how did these 5p strings, an on-off fad in France since the fifties, suddenly become the year's unexpected hit among England's tech-savvy pre-teens? Trend Surfing decided to investigate. As we unravelled the plastic trail, we found our way to the Bristol offices of Amanda Miles, a promotional marketer more used to selling branded mugs and mouse-mats. Last autumn, on a hunch, Miles decided to start importing Scoubidous from the Continent. Since then, she claims, her company, Purple Rhino Scoubidou, has sold several million packs. "And it It hasn't even gone national yet," she says excitedly. "We have barely scratched the surface."

Miles has no children of her own, but she does have two 10-year-old twin sisters at a private school in Bristol. Last September, one of the girls' classmates brought in some Scoubidous picked up at a French market. "Everybody in the class loved them," Miles recalls. "My sisters asked if I could get hold of some. I phoned loads of toy shops here, but most had never heard of it. Then my family went to Spain for the weekend, and the toy shops there had all sold out. So I found the manufacturer, and decided to import them myself."

That was in October. At first, the UK toy buyers she contacted assumed she was selling Scooby-Doo merchandise, but they no longer need her to explain the difference. Each day now she has truckloads arriving to supply shops such as John Lewis and Harrods. "I spoke to so many toy shops, but they just weren't interested," she recalls. "Then all of a sudden, it went 'boomf' - and now everyone's jumping on the bandwagon."

There have been concerns in Europe about phthalates used in the manufacturing process, which a German consumer magazine claims could harm children who happen to chew the strings. "Codswallop," responds Miles. "It's been proven that there's no danger in our strands - but I can't talk for the cheap knock-offs selling in the pound shops." To what, then, does she attribute the strings' sudden popularity? "It's the creativeness and the coordination skills," she says. "Children have got to use their brains, and they get to make whatever they want, from earrings to helicopters."

There is also the matter of the secret Scoubidou language, which until now has never been revealed to the grown-ups. A bracelet made from interwoven blue and black strands signifies a muscle-man; an orange and white one suggests that the wearer is heartbroken. And green and white means "Be mine". Just don't say who told you.

(The Times, April 16 2005)

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Interview: Adam Boulton, Sky News (Evening Standard)

By David Rowan

THROW Adam Boulton a question, and he'll fire back an instant camera-ready opinion. On a live 24-hour channel like Sky, this rare ability to extemporise provocatively yet thoughtfully has made him one of Britain's highest-paid reporters - the only political editor on a package (excluding clothing allowance) reputedly approaching £500,000.

So, it is unfair to play that old newspaper trick and boil down a typically eloquent hour-long Boulton discourse into a few startlingly opinionated soundbites. Still, here we go anyway. BBC and ITV news are "doomed". Labour's election team has a "worrying" zeal to exclude the media that must be fought. As for Boulton's own contribution to journalism: "Andrew
Marr would not exist" without him.

But first, in true Sky style, the big live story - Labour's obsession with bypassing journalists on the campaign trail. The Sun's political editor, Trevor Kavanagh, calls this "the most stage-managed campaign in election history". Boulton says it is becoming the story itself. "It's a worry," he says, "and it's something we report. This morning's news event, where as soon as the photo opportunity was over they blocked the cameras - you'll see all that on Sky tonight, that they staged the event,
didn't invite most of the press and blocked access. We show all that, so no one could call us patsies."

Still, he is not complaining too loudly. He admits that the policy benefits TV correspondents at the expense of newspapers, whose journalists are reduced to phoning him to learn about Labour's next media event. "We get access that the print people only get on an exceptional basis," he agrees. But that, he adds, is because Labour feels it cannot trust the papers to report fairly. "I asked one of Blair's spin doctors why they wouldn't do live TV debates and the first excuse was that they couldn't trust the newspapers to report the debates straight. However Blair performed, they'd say he'd been humiliated." Television, by contrast, is obliged to be "fair and balanced".

Not all TV is equal, though. "I think terrestrial news is ultimately doomed," he asserts. It is not, perhaps, an entirely surprising view from a man who has been with Sky since it launched 16 years ago, joining from TV-am. But ratings, he says, will prove his case. "On the BBC and ITV, news is seen as as bridge between Neighbours and whatever comes next, so the bulletins are under increasing pressure to be populist," he says. "Now, there's a thin line between populist and patronising. We at Sky are mercifully free of the pressures of having inherited an accidental audience. We can offer dedication to news. So the terrestrial news at 10, at 10.30, are doomed."

AS BEFITS an employee of a Murdoch-controlled broadcaster, Boulton shows little love for the BBC. "When I started at Sky, I can remember a BBC news producer questioning why we were having all those 'irrelevant' Eurosceptics on" - implying a
political agenda. "I said it was because they were going to break the Tory party, and I think I was proved right. The guy who launched BBC News 24 said they weren't going to put news conferences on live, as that wasn't what 24-hour news
should be doing. I think we won that argument, too.

"And here's a really arrogant claim," he adds. "Andrew Marr would not exist if it wasn't for Adam Boulton. People may hate it, but the character political commentary that everyone competes with, we, I, was doing it first."

Innovation remains a key selling point for Sky's election coverage, from on-screen "poll bugs" to a choice of 16 screens on election night. Boulton, 46, is working even longer hours than usual, starting at around 7am and finishing at midnight after the second of his hour-long weeknight talk shows. The weekends are also packed, with Saturday night and Sunday morning
shows to present, and whatever live reporting the newsdesk requires.

On election night, he will be on for 12 hours straight with Julie Etchingham. "After 11.30pm, frankly, we haven't got a clue what we're doing, we just know we'll go with the story. Unlike terrestrial coverage, which will be lulling itself into a coma, we won't disappear up our own swingometer."

Boulton expresses passing admiration for Fox News, Murdoch's notoriously partisan US channel, which "found a niche in the market". Has Murdoch ever leaned on him to push a political line? "In 16 years, I've been at dinners with Rupert Murdoch twice, and bumped into him in the corridors twice," he replies. "Believe it or not, when I have had conversations with him, it's
him asking me what I think is going on, not telling me what to say."

Murdoch has "good business reasons" not to interfere, he adds. When John O'Loan, the first head of Sky News, offered him the job, Boulton asked if it would require a political twist. "He said, 'No, you know that wouldn't work.' That was the moment I decided I could do this job. He meant that, if we were boycotted by half the parties over suspected bias, we'd be producing a less competitive product."

When Boulton was revealed in 2002 to be in a relationship with Anji Hunter, former "gatekeeper" to Tony Blair, some newspapers questioned whether his objectivity would be tarnished. It has remained a non-issue, he insists. "None of the politicians has ever raised it with me. Even when I had to interview Iain Duncan Smith on the day it was The Mail on Sunday's splash, he said it was absolutely not a problem, it didn't in any way question what Ido.

"What are Anji's politics, anyway? I'm also related by marriage to a prominent Tory peer [the wife he left for Hunter is the daughter of the late Lord Melchett]. How can you possibly say because someone has a relationship it affects their political views?"

MORE damaging perhaps was the revelation that four years ago Number 10 sounded him out to replace Alastair Campbell. "I think everyone's talked to Number 10," he says, a little annoyed. "Look, if you really want to know, I have been approached by all three main parties. It's not unknown, though not something I personally approve of, for journalists to move into PR, is it?"

The irony is that Boulton has been one of the spin machine's most outspoken critics, complaining to the Phillis Inquiry into government communication about Labour's reliance on "assertion, omission, diverting attention to others, pre-emptive briefing and leaking, and ... bullying and ridicule" of journalists. He has also accused ministers of seeking to "emasculate" broadcast coverage of politics. Now, to his relief, he feels the tendency is easing, simply because "control-freakery" became counterproductive. But "exclusion" - keeping out the press - is a growing concern. If the parties want to make their case directly to voters, he says, they ought to accept a live TV debate, perhaps staged by the Electoral Commission.

As for his own post-election plans, Boulton professes bemusement at media gossip linking him to an executive role at Sky or a move to ITV if Nick Robinson replaces Andrew Marr. "I'll keep doing what I'm doing," he says. "The fascinating thing about this job is that everything is always evolving. I began on television with TV-am, which is now out of business. There can be no guarantees that this company or indeed the BBC will exist in 10 years' time."

Meanwhile, there is a "genuinely exciting" campaign to report. "Me, Andrew and Nick all agree that the chattering-class assumption that the result is a foregone conclusion is not right," he says. "I can also tell you that Tony Blair doesn't believe it is either."

But ... if Boulton was forced to predict the winner? "Sky," he says, quick as lightning. And he flashes one of his trademark "back-to-the-studio" grins.

(Evening Standard, April 13 2005)

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Trendsurfing: Prefab homes (The Times)

By David Rowan

You have perfected your stunning home interior, the ultimate blend of cutting-edge gadgetry and soft, natural surfaces. But before you invite Elle Deco round, you really will need to lose those walls. Brick and plaster are so 20th century, darling. Today's chic homeowner will settle for nothing less than a flat-pack prefab. The modernist prefabricated home is suddenly a hot item in the design community. Forget the postwar cliche of the claustrophobic box: today's factory assembled dwellings are the ultimate in stylish, eco-friendly cool. Call them "designer prefabs", "systems-built housing" or "modular flat-packs", they are built off-site and then trucked in to be assembled. And with demand booming from Europe to Australia, the concept is suddenly a mainstream alternative to bricks and slate.

The idea is not new: almost a century ago, Sears advertised mail-order homes in its shopping catalogue, and in the Seventies, Tokyo developers sold prefabricated "living capsules" to make efficient use of land. But with recent improvements in materials, amid concern about everything from the environment to housing shortages, serious Western architects are taking note. And now the store chains are muscling in.

Ikea, which built a flatpack village in Boklok, Sweden, has begun offering British customers its ready-to-install apartments. The open-plan flats are grouped in L-shaped blocks, starting at around £70,000 per residence. Meanwhile, Muji in Japan offers its "modelhouse" for around £100,000 including fittings, and in the US, Target has worked with architect Michael Graves to develop a kit house. The smallest units cost just £6,000, although a family-sized home, including land, costs more than £150,000.

No wonder the chains see huge profits ahead. The Freedonia Group, a US market-research firm, expects the prefab-housing market to be worth $12 billion by 2007, and investors such as Warren Buffett are buying into the manufacturing firms. Still, many of the most acclaimed prefabs are small-scale projects by less commercial architects. You can view examples at www.fabprefab.com, from the wooden "smallhouse", made by WeberHaus in Switzerland, to the "m-house", designed by Tim Pyne in London. Pyne's elegant house is technically a mobile home, which means it will not normally need planning permission. Still, it doesn't look much like a conventional caravan, and, at £150,000, is certainly not priced like one.

It is hard not to be awed by many of these structures, which typically show a remarkable creative vision. One of the most impressive is the eco-friendly Glidehouse by San Francisco designer Michelle Kaufmann, a former student of Frank Gehry, who has built the house around a series of sliding panels, which control the light and air-flow, using "environmentally sustainable" materials such as glass and bamboo. An Australian architectural practice, Stutchbury and Pape, has gone further: its self-assembly home is made from recycled cardboard, held together with polyester tape and Velcro. The roof, at least, is made from waterproof plastic.

Perhaps Britain is not yet ready for the cardboard house. But with key workers clamouring for low-cost homes, the modern-day prefab is getting John Prescott excited. Just don't mention his name when trying to impress Elle Deco.

(The Times, April 9 2005)

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The Times Op-Ed: A guide to electionspeak

By David Rowan

There is nothing like a good war to reinvigorate the language. Sure enough, the battle for No 10 is already carpet-bombing political discourse with lexical missiles. Decode the neologisms and euphemisms and you gain a rare insight into the strategists' true intentions. That is why, over the next month, this column will be filtering their linguistic creations to guide you through this war of words.

One firm theme has already emerged in this first official week of campaigning: the spin machines would rather keep us troublesome journalists out of the loop. For Labour's strategists, the buzzword is direct communication - cosy meetings between candidates and "ordinary voters", ideally captured by television cameras and with no opportunities for hacks to ask questions.

If some of those photogenic voters seem familiar from earlier drop-ins, as the chats are known, that is because they are endorsers - "a cross-section of the local community", as a Labour press officer asserts, but also pre-screened party supporters who may travel from event to event. After all, no one at Labour HQ wants another Sharon Storer moment, as they refer to Tony Blair's 2001 confrontation with a woman concerned about hospital standards.

It also explains Mr Blair's preference for soft sofa media - interviewers, when he must face them, as tough and probing as Little Ant and Dec.

Thanks to their lively Australian strategist, Lynton Crosby, the Conservatives are at least ahead in the battle for colourful jargon. Mr Crosby's obsession with dog-whistle issues explains Michael Howard's repetition of key phrases such as "so-called human rights" and "yob culture".

As with a high-pitched dog whistle, these messages are designed to rouse a specific audience without disturbing the wider electorate. The best the Liberal Democrats can do, by comparison, is cast the word decapitation into wider political usage. Sadly, this refers only to their strategy of targeting Conservative seats such as Mr Howard's, rather than a more physically vigorous battle plan that would guarantee coverage on prime-time television.

It does seem that election-related technology is having a disproportionate linguistic impact on the campaign. We have had blogjackings - the hacking of a candidate's weblog, as happened this week to the Conservative standing in North Norfolk. The swingometer, meanwhile, has been surpassed by on-screen worm polls, tracking audience reaction to speeches in real time.

All that's missing are the policy buzzwords. Let's hope we hear some next week.


A Glossary for the Nineties by David Rowan is published by Prion Books

(The Times Comment page, April 9 2005)

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Interview: Nigel Pickard, ITV (Evening Standard)

By David Rowan

WHEN the ITV companies merged last winter, the big fear was that programming would suffer in the rush for profits. Now, just as analysts warned, viewers are voting with their remote controls. A fifth of younger viewers, it emerged this week, have abandoned ITV1 over the past 12 months. Cost-cutting and job cuts may have boosted the network's share price - but has the result been to lose touch with the audience?

The main channel's ratings certainly suggest a problem. In the year to March, ITV1 lost 13 per cent of its 16- to 34-year-olds. The drop was not quite as bad as the 23 per cent fall in January and February, but then those months were skewed by the popularity last year of I'm A Celebrity ... Get Me Out of Here!.

Equally worrying, its audience has moved downmarket, with a drop of around 10 per cent year-onyear among the more affluent ABC1 viewers. With some midevening shows, such as the IVF documentary Precious Babies, attracting fewer than three million viewers, questions are being asked about the network's direction.

But Nigel Pickard, its amiable director of programmes, brushes off the suggestion that he is a man under pressure. "The trouble is," he says with a grin and a headshake, "people take a snapshot of the schedule at one moment, but we can take another snapshot which shows we're heavier on the 16 to 34s and ABC1s. Nobody is dodging the fact that it's bloody competitive out there, and that there was some year-on-year decline. But it's exactly the same drop as for Channel 4 and Five, while BBC2's decline was two-anda-half times as big."

Pickard, who arrived in 2002 after two years running Children's BBC, has the jovial, matey manner you would expect from the man best known for "discovering" Ant and Dec and reinventing Basil Brush. Yet Monday's Evening Standard, which reported the latest "slump" to hit his "ailing channel", has clearly infuriated him, and he wants it known.

"The idea that Robson Green's Wire in the Blood was a 'loser' is just so unfair, so nasty," he says mid-interview, pointing to a photo caption. "It was one of our highest rating shows this year, which we've recommissioned. Why would I recommission a 'loser'?"

FALLING ratings are not just ITV1's problem, he insists. Indeed, seen as "a family" that includes its growing digital portfolio, soon to be joined by a men's channel, the network's overall audience is rising. "ITV2 has outstripped Sky One as the most watched channel in digital homes. ITV3 was the most successful launch of any UK channel. Yet go back three years, and everybody was slagging off our multichannel strategy."

That may be, but Pickard, 52, knows that the main terrestrial channel's performance is what matters. So, in search of the next I'm a Celebrity ... , his new summer schedule is packed with shows such as Celebrity Love Island, Celebrity Shark Bait, Celebrity Wrestling, Celebrities Under Pressure, even one featuring celebrities regressing into their past lives.

Does he really see ITV1's future as the home of the humiliated D-list celeb? "If Channel 4 owns the summer with 10 weeks of Big Brother, you can't just rely on repeats of your tried-and-tested formats like Frost and Midsomer Murders," he says. "In comparison, I'm a Celebrity ... lasts just 14 days. But we're not simply salami-slicing the celebrity genre. Format is everything. Celebrity Wrestling is a wonderful, tongue-in-cheek WWF-meets-Gladiators, which the celebrities absolutely went for - I'm afraid we had broken bones. It's about creating entertainment events that get talked about."

He has also been accused of relying too heavily on soaps at the heart of the schedules, with Emmerdale on six days a week, and two-and-a-half hours of Coronation Street. Doesn't that betray a lack of innovation? "No, they give us a fantastic platform to try other things in the schedule," he replies.

"They've actually helped us take risks. You say we don't take risks, but I don't think many channels would have dedicated 14 days of the schedule to a stripped entertainment programme like Get Me Out of Here. Some opinion formers might say the channel has become a bit crass and tabloid, but that was innovation and heavy risk-taking." He adds that the channel "hasn't yet reached a cap on what we'll do with the soaps".

But if viewing figures have fallen in the past year, profits are up 57 per cent, to £340 million. Could it be that shareholder pressure is affecting ITV1's performance?

"As with any business, your shareholders have a view if you don't run things properly," he says. "But do they influence scheduling? No. There's no undue influence on what we commission. Yes, on a daytoday basis, of course your job is to get as many people as you can to watch. But I've been under that sort of pressure for 15 years as a commissioner. I do not have a weekly meeting with Charles Allen [the chief executive] when he says, 'Nigel, those ratings are terrible, can we do more of that?'" He says he last talked to Allen a month ago.

STILL, ITV1 has been lobbying regulators remarkably successfully to drop many of its obligations regarding religious, children's and regional programming. The network is also urging Ofcom to raise advertising limits from seven to nine minutes an hour, and to allow product placement in shows.

Faced with these new commercial imperatives, isn't Pickard simply doing the shareholders' bidding in streamlining his increasingly profitable channel? "I can absolutely see that that's the way it's taken, but it's not the case," he insists. "It's just that we don't simply want to tick certain boxes [to please the regulators]. You're doing the audience a disservice if you're not making programmes that are attractive to them." His programme budget, more than £800 million, has not been cut, he points out. Only if ITV were taken over by foreign investors would he worry about cost-stripping.

In the meantime, his reforms to public-service parts of the schedule, he insists, are simply about modernisation. "Take religion: last year, BBC1 only made 84 hours of religion, but we were mandated to do 104 hours. There seems to be an anomaly here. I felt that was not a particularly sensible or fair approach to box-ticking."

Now, with Ofcom's blessing, he plans "a more exciting approach", weaving religion into soaps and documentaries. The proposals have angered a number of bishops and Christian groups. "I don't think they found it particularly helpful that we hadn't engaged directly with them," Pickard admits. "But when we did there was a fantastic amount of agreement. They welcome the 52 hours we now do as an improvement."

Nor, he says, is it true that children's programming is being cut. "We won't reduce our output, but we want the freedom to interpret what we make for kids, not be held by some outdated set of regulations. Before, you'd have to make so many hours of pre-school shows, but you weren't allowed to include animation. That's just nuts."

As for the channel's emphasis on original drama, he considers ITV's role in underpinning UK production to be an equally important if under-recognised example of its public-service remit.

In the meantime, Pickard accepts that he faces a challenge in boosting ITV1's ratings. "Looking at this week's coverage, of course there's a story there, I see that," he says. "But this isn't a sprint, it's a marathon. We've got hugely successful shows coming in, and I know that some will work and some won't. I've just got to minimise those that won't."

And if his celebrity summer fails to cut it, he knows there won't be too many second chances.

(Evening Standard, April 6 2005)

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Trendsurfing: Child-tracking (The Times)

By David Rowan

Have you tagged your kids today? It's the latest way to dissipate parental anxieties. Thanks to a new range of high-tech monitoring tools, it is now easier than ever to spy electronically on your children. You can track their movements via the mobile phone system, remotely monitor their presence in school, even learn when your teenager is driving too fast, thanks to a satellite-linked service that will snitch on him or her by e-mail. As intrusiveness goes, it makes 1984 look tame - but if it reassures the grown-ups, the burgeoning child-tracking industry can only get bigger.

Mobile-phone companies have been quick to spot an opportunity. Services such as Phonetrack in Britain will, for a fee, use the GPS satellite system to locate your children to within a few hundred yards. You can trace their movements over the internet, provided they have their phones switched on, and gather evidence with which to challenge them later. They may not appreciate being monitored, but at least you can argue that you are trying to protect them.

An American company, Teen Arrive Alive, goes further, letting parents know not only their child's location (updated every two minutes), but also how fast he or she has been driving. The satellite network picks up signals from their Motorola phones, and mum and dad keep informed via text message or e-mail. As the company's sales pitch boasts, "Whether you're on vacation in Europe or having dinner at a local restaurant, you can check on your child whether they are driving to a ball game, riding in a friend's car, or hanging out at the mall." It won't necessarily make you a better parent, but at least you'll feel less guilty on that indulgent trip to Europe.

More controversial is the growing use of radio-frequency "smart tags" to monitor junior's whereabouts. Radio-frequency identification (RFID) tags have been used for some years to track farm animals or domestic pets, but now primary schools and amusement parks are attaching them to little people. Schools in Japan and the United States have been fitting the tags to pupils' name-tags and schoolbags, with scanners built into school gates and classroom doors to read their signals from a distance. One Tokyo school sends parents automatic text messages each time their child steps on or off the bus. The service is particularly popular after a rash of recent media reports of child kidnappings.

Much of the current push towards electronic child-tracking is based on claims that it makes children safer. That, at least, is how the new systems are being marketed. But would it really help prevent a kidnapping? Even if a child is shown to have safely left a school bus at the correct stop, he or she has no greater protection after that. As for tracking systems that use mobile phones, what happens after a phone is switched off?

Still, there is money to be made, and we are going to be sold a lot more of these tracking systems in the coming months. But beyond the hype, this trend is more about selling parental convenience than child safety. Visitors to Legoland may well feel reassured by renting "KidSpotter" RFID wristbands to locate their children on electronic maps. But would you really want to rely on a wireless tracking system as a substitute for parental responsibility?

(The Times Magazine, April 2 2005)

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