Showing posts with label Gordon Brown. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Gordon Brown. Show all posts

More bad news for Gordon Brown

A recent World Public Opinion survey has some interesting results about how Gordon Brown and other world leaders are regarded in the USA and in their home countries when it comes to world affairs.

64% of Americans compared with only 46% of us Brits have 'a lot' or 'some' confidence in Mr Brown 'to do the right thing regarding world affairs'.

In American eyes, this puts him way ahead of other European leaders like President Sarkozy (46%) and Chancellor Merkel (47%), and his 64% would be very heartening for him - if only Americans could vote Labour in next year's general election.

But they won't be able to, and what must make Brown very envious indeed about these numbers is Mrs Merkel's extremely high ratings from the Germans themselves, eight out out ten of whom (82%) have 'a lot' or 'some' confidence in her doing the right thing in world affairs.

There's no such thing as a boring subject

One of the more memorable lines from the late David Ellis-Jones, with whom I used to teach presentation and communication skills at the Henley Management College, was "There's no such thing as a boring subject; there are only boring speakers."

People often didn't believe him and often don't believe me when I repeat the line. Anyone with similar doubts should have a look at this recent posting from Chris Witt to see what an interesting topic 'bacteria' can be.

One of the least promising subjects I ever heard a presenter talking about was the history of changes in UK retirement pensions. The speaker was Steve Bee of Scottish Life, whom I saw holding an audience of 800+ riveted and entertained by the topic.

He also taught me something new. Although I'd been advocating the use of 'chalk and talk' (i.e. writing and/or drawing stuff up on a blackboard or flip chart as you go along) for years, I also used to enter the caveat that people in big audiences may not be able to see what you're doing.

But Steve Bee used a visualiser, a technologically slicker version of the old blank rolls of acetate on overhead projectors. His only visual aid was a blank sheet of paper, on which he gradually drew an ever more complicated diagram that was not only critical to his general argument, but was also clearly visible on the screen above him - and made me realise that 'chalk and talk' can be as effective with a huge audience as it can be with a small one.

On the subject of 'boring subjects', one of the interesting things on the British political scene in the recent past has been the rising esteem for the deputy leader of the Liberal Democrats, Vince Cable, whose star has risen on the back of his ability to sound as though he's talking more sense about complicated economic and financial topics than most of his competitors.

However boring and incomprehensible such subjects may seem at first sight - or when coming out of the mouths of Gordon Brown or Alistair Darling - Cable talks about them with clarity and authority.

And it's probably no coincidence that, unlike most of his political opponents, he's one of the ever-decreasing number of MPs who actually had a proper job outside politics before becoming a full-time politician.

As chief economist at Shell, making economics intelligible to colleagues who weren't trained as economists must have been a routine part of Vince Cable's everyday working life - that has now, in his 'new' life, become his strongest 'political' asset.http://www.pensionsguru.guru/

'Pre-delicate hitches' from Brown as he avoids answering a question about the Queen

I’ve already posted some observations about ‘pre-delicate hitches’ coming out of the mouths of Gordon Brown and Hillary Clinton.

The general point is that such ‘hitches’ (e.g. ums, ers, pauses, restarted words, etc.) tend to happen when a speaker is about to say something that he or she knows is likely to come across as ‘delicate’ to their listeners.

And they came thick and fast on Sunday morning as Mr Brown tried to deal with Andrew Marr’s challenging question about why the Queen hadn’t been invited to attend the D-Day commemorations in Normandy.

Needless to say, he didn’t make any attempt to answer the question, but the number and frequency of 'hitches' suggest that he might actually have been finding his own evasiveness more uncomfortable than he usually does.

MARR: It’s a disgrace, is it not, that the Queen is not going to be representing us at D-Day at those commemoration services in France. How did that come about?

BROWN: I-I think-uh-eh you have to uh-ask-uh th-the palace to get their statements uh-u- on this.

Uh I have simply done what is my duty as a – as a Prime Minister – I’ve-uh accepted the u-personal invitation of Mr- Mr Sarkozy.

I think you know that Mr Harper, the Canadian prime minister, i- is going, and I think in these circumstances, this particular event uh-was-uh this one of the events was –was –was one that the president wanted to be for prime ministers and presidents, but if the Queen wanted to attend these- these- these events, or if any member of the Royal family wanted to attend these events, I would make that possible."


Why has Gordon Brown become a regular on the Today programme?

It used to be the case that the prime ministers only went on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme during general elections (when they appeared in one of the slots for party leaders), or when they were visiting some foreign country.

That was certainly the rule in Mrs Thatcher’s day, and I don’t remember hearing much of Blair on the programme (except during elections) either.

So I was very surprised, not long after he’d finally made it into number 10, to hear Gordon Brown being interviewed on Today. And he seems to have made a habit of it and was at it again this morning, less than 24 hours after doing a TV interview with Andrew Marr on Sunday.

What’s even more surprising is that Mr Brown (and/or his aides) seem to think that it’s a smart move to inflict more and more interviews with him on a mass audience.

If his interview performances had a proven track record in winning friends and influencing people, they might have a point.

But, as I’ve noted before (e.g. HERE), Mr Brown is not as smart an interviewee as he seems to think he is – unless, of course, I’m completely wrong in believing that there’s nothing like repetitive evasiveness and undisciplined verbosity when it comes to alienating listeners and viewers.

Gordon Brown seems to agree that Labour is ‘savage’ and ‘inhuman’

Unless nodding your head has come to mean something other than expressing agreement with the person you’re listening to, there was an extraordinary sequence in David Cameron’s reply to the Budget speech on Wednesday in which the Gordon Brown was to be seen to nodding quite cheerfully on being told his government is ‘savage’ and ‘inhuman’:

Poems for St George's Day


A few years ago, we had a St George's Day supper in the village pub, where part of the evening's entertainment involved giving people the first line of a limerick for them to complete.

The results included the following:

A bard from Stratford called Will
Never had enough strength in his quill.
He asked for Viagra,
But never could find her.
Forsooth Will, it's only a pill.

A bard from Stratford called Will

Drank some whiskey that made him quite ill.

Those three Scottish witches

Made him sick to the breeches.

Now he drinks Gin from a good English still.

Upon the road to Priddy Fair,

I met a maid with golden hair.

We argued all night

As to who had the right

To do what with whom and where.

There once was an English rose

With a large and roseate nose.

But it wasn't much fun

When the cold made it run,

And the drips that fell from it froze.

When Henry fought at Agincourt,

He found himself ten archers short.

"I must have the barrows

With plenty of arrows,

Or this battle will all come to nought."

P.S. Since posting these I've had an email with a rather more topical post-Budget theme:

A Scotsman called Gordon McBrown
Made the English grimace and frown
By taxing their wealth
With cunning and stealth.
But they noticed and voted him down.

Time for Gordon Brown to say "sorry" to savers


After today's belated “sorry" for emailgate, Gordon Brown went on to say that he had been “horrified, shocked and very angry indeed” about it – words that exactly sum up how I’ve been feeling about his onslaught on savers ever since he became Chancellor of the Exchequer in 1997.

This blog normally concentrates on, and with occasional exceptions like today, will continue to concentrate on making observations about speaking and communication, rather than expressing political opinions. But I’ve been “horrified, shocked and very angry indeed” about Mr Brown’s attack on savers for twelve years for the very simple reason that it occurred at a time when I was devising a strategy for my own savings and retirement.

Having decided some years before 1997 that I wanted to avoid having to sink my life’s savings into an iniquitous annuity that would allow some life insurance company to pay a pitiful rate of interest – and then pocket the lot if I happened to die the next day – I had already started to invest as heavily as I could in PEPs, on the grounds that it seemed preferable to pay the tax first and enjoy tax-free benefits later than to get tax relief on today’s pension contributions in exchange for the dubious benefits of an annuity tomorrow (not to mention to have the freedom to bequeath anything I hadn’t spent to people more dear to me than an insurance company).

Then, and people seem to have forgotten this, one of Brown’s first plans when he became Chancellor was to introduce retrospective legislation that would eliminate the tax advantages that had induced millions of us to invest in PEPs. I remember writing to him (and every other relevant politician I could think of) pointing out how unfair this was, and urging that there should be no change in the terms of reference that had made people like me opt for this particular form of savings in the first place.

Thankfully, Brown dropped that plan, but didn’t drop the even more cunning plan of abolishing one of the main incentives to put savings into pension policies, namely the tax relief on dividends earned within a pension fund that used to make them build up more quickly than would otherwise have been the case.

The first ten years of this infamous raid on pension funds bagged in excess of £100 billion from millions of thrifty savers who had been naïve enough to think it might be a good idea save for their retirement.

Even without the post-credit crunch shrinkage of interest now payable on annuities, Brown’s raid had already guaranteed us a much lower pension than we’d been led to believe we’d get when we first signed up for it. It also fired the starting gun for more and more companies to close down their final salary pension schemes.

Two other things about Mr Brown’s position on savings and pensions also leave me “horrified, shocked and very angry indeed.”

One is that he suddenly and belatedly started to sound surprised and worried that the country is now facing a major pensions crisis.

The other is that, whenever interviewers dare to raise the subject with him, he never admits that he had anything to do with it, and becomes even more evasive than the 'default' extreme evasiveness he typically displays in response to any question anyone ever puts to him.

Saying “sorry” for emailgate may or may not work as an effective piece of damage limitation in the aftermath of the recent misconduct of his inner circle.

But the “sorry” millions of us are still waiting for is for the damage he, and not his henchmen, did to our savings.

Unfortunately for us, it’s far too late to limit the damage he’s already done.

Unfortunately for him, none of us will have forgotten about it when we go into the ballot box.

Gordon Brown’s G20 address ignores an important tip from Winston Churchill

Whenever I’m asked about the biggest single problem I’ve come across since migrating from academia into training and coaching, my answer is always the same, namely the sight and sound of speakers trying to get far too much information across – aided and abetted by programs like PowerPoint that implicitly encourage presenters to load up the screen with far too much detail.

It’s something that was very well understood by Winston Churchill, who said:

“If you have an important point to make, don't try to be subtle or clever. Use a pile driver. Hit the point once. Then come back and hit it again. Then hit it a third time with a tremendous whack.”

But it’s never been very well understood by Gordon Brown, as was evidenced yet again in his address at yesterday’s pre-G20 press conference.

Announcing that there are five tests for the G20 summit may not have been quite as daunting to the audience as showing a slide listing seventeen items to be covered, as was once tried by someone I was trying to cure. But it hardly makes you sit up eagerly waiting to hear what’s coming up.

If you can bear to test this out for yourself, try watching the segment below, wait ten minutes and then see how many of his 5 points you can remember (and this clip, by the way, only took up 28% of the full statement, which serious anoraks can watch HERE ).



Other recent postings on Gordon Brown's speeches include:
Gordon Brown is finding the Jacqui Smith expenses story more ‘delicate’ than he says
It’s time Brown stopped recycling other people’s lines
Brown’s ‘poetry’ heads up news of his speech to Congress
Unexpected poetry in Gordon Brown's speech to the US Congress
Gordon Brown’s model example of how to express condolences

Gordon Brown is finding the Jacqui Smith expenses story more ‘delicate’ than he says


Long ago, I heard one of the founders of conversation analysis (and I can’t remember whether it was Emanuel Schegloff or Gail Jefferson) talking about ‘pre-delicate hitches’ – a rather cumbersome piece of jargon for referring to a fairly common occurrence in conversation.

‘Hitches’ are things like ‘uh-’ and ‘um-, restarts of a word, or slight pauses, and the observation was that these are regularly found at those points in a conversation where the speaker is leading towards a word or a topic that they know is rather ‘delicate’ (e.g. a swear word, obscenity or potentially controversial news, gossip, etc.).

The general argument was that such ‘hitches’ are used to give advance notice that we’re about to say something that we know is rather ‘delicate’ – and know that others might find ‘delicate’ too.

I was therefore fascinated to notice that there were at least ten ‘pre-delicate hitches’ in the first four sentences of Gordon Brown’s comments about the scandal of the Home Secretary’s expenses claim for a blue movie watched by her husband – which you can check out by following the transcript below (hitches in bold) while watching the video HERE.

(P.S. Since posting this, I've realised that you can't actually read the transcript at the same time as watching the video, so keen anoraks will have to copy it on to another file and/or print it out).

BROWN:

"This is- this is very much a-a personal matter (pause) uh- for- for Jacqui.
"She’s made her uh- apology.
"Her husband has made it uh- clear that he is- he is apologised `(sic).
"Uh I-I think that the best thing is that Jacqui Smith gets- gets on with her work as- which is what she wants to do."

What these hitches suggest is that Mr Brown is finding the whole episode much more delicate than he’s letting on in the words that he actually uses.

(If you found this of any interest, you might also like to inspect my explanation of his claim to 'have saved the world' gaffe in December).

Rhetorical techniques and imagery in Hannan’s attack on Brown – edited highlights

As promised the other day, here are some notes on the rhetorical highlights of Daniel Hannan’s attack on Gordon Brown.

At its simplest, the more use a speaker makes of the main rhetorical techniques and imagery to get key messages across, the more likely it is that a speech will achieve high audience ratings (for more detail on these and how to use them, see any of the books listed on the left).

Given the impact of this particular speech, it’s therefore hardly surprising to see just how frequently he uses them – at a rate that comes close to the frequency to be found in some of Barack Obama's speeches (on which, see earlier postings on his victory speech and inaugural address).

Edited footage of the following five highlights can be seen below.

1. THE OPENING

Attention grabbing opening with a Puzzle (that sounds as it though it could be a compliment) followed by a solution packaged as a contrast (that turns out to be an insult/attack):

PUZZLE:
Prime Minister, I see you’ve already mastered the essential craft of the European politician,

SOLUTION:
(A) namely the ability to say one thing in this chamber
(B) and a very different thing to your home electorate.

2. ATTACK PACKAGED AS A ‘YOU/OUR ‘ CONTRAST:

The truth, Prime Minister, is that you have run out of our money.

3. EXTENDED METAPHOR INTRODUCED BY TWO CONTRASTS:

(A) It is true that we are all sailing together into the squalls.
(B) But not every vessel in the convoy is in the same dilapidated condition.

(A) Other ships used the good years to caulk their hulls and clear their rigging; in other words – to pay off debt.
(B) But you used the good years to raise borrowing yet further.

As a consequence, under your captaincy, our hull is pressed deep into the water line under the accumulated weight of your debt.

4. INSULT/ATTACK PACKAGED AS A‘NOT (A) BUT’ (B) CONTRAST WITH ALLITERATION:

(A) Now, it’s not that you’re not apologising; like everyone else I have long accepted that you’re pathologically incapable of accepting responsibility for these things.

(B) It’s that you’re carrying on, wilfully worsening our situation, wantonly spending what little we have left.

5. CONTRASTS FOLLOWED BY SIMILE, FOUR 3 PART LISTS (WITH REPETITION) AND A CONCLUDING PUZZLE-SOLUTION:

(A) Prime Minister you cannot go on forever squeezing the productive bit of the economy
(B) in order to fund an unprecedented engorging of the unproductive bit. [applause]

(A) You cannot spend your way out of recession
(B) or borrow your way out of debt.

And when you repeat, in that wooden and perfunctory way, that our situation is better than others, that we’re well placed to weather the storm, I have to tell you, you sound like a Brezhnev-era Apparatchik giving the party line.

(1) You know,
(2) and we know,
(3) and you know that we know that it’s nonsense.

Everyone knows that Britain is worse off than any other country to go into these hard times.

(1) The IMF has said so.
(2) The European Commission has said so.
(3) The markets have said so, which is why our currency has devalued by 30% – and soon the voters, too, will get their chance to say so.

And soon the voters too will get their chance to say so.

PUZZLE: They can see what the markets have already seen:
SOLUTION: that you are the devalued Prime Minister of a devalued government.

Media coverage of Daniel Hannan's attack on Gordon Brown in Strasbourg


Yesterday, when I posted news of Daniel Hannan’s speech to the European Parliament, it had already attracted 22,000 viewings and 208 comments on YouTube in less than 24 hours. The latest score at the time of writing has shot up to 660,691 viewings and 4,560 comments.

Yet there’s still been no mention of it on any BBC news programme or on its website. Nor will you be able to find any reference to it on the websites of ITN, Sky News or Channel 4 News.

If you search through the websites of leading British newspapers, you’ll find that the only one with any reference to the speech happens to be the one for which Mr Hannan writes and on which he has a blog, namely The Daily Telegraph.

But the US media has been rather less neglectful in their coverage of this story, and anyone interested in hearing more about the speech can see an extended interview with the MEP on the Fox News website HERE.

And you can watch this space for some comments on the rhetorical highlights within the next day or two.

It's time Gordon Brown stopped recycling other people's lines

I’ve warned Gordon Brown and his speechwriters before (HERE) that it’s not a good idea to lift lines from other people’s speeches. This was prompted by one of the lines from a speech he made in July last year:

“There’s nothing bad about Britain that cannot be corrected by what’s good about Britain …”

This bore an uncanny resemblance to something Bill Clinton had said in his inaugural address in January 1993:

“There is nothing wrong with America that cannot be cured by what is right with America.”

Then, when Brown spoke to the US Congress three weeks ago, he came up with:

“There is no old Europe, no new Europe, there is only your friend Europe.”

Not surprisingly, this got some commentators wondering if his scriptwriters had now started borrowing from the collected works of Barack Obama, whose address at the 2004 Democratic Convention had included the folowing:

“There is not a liberal America and a conservative America -- there is the United States of America. There is not a Black America and a White America and Latino America and Asian America -- there’s the United States of America.”

Obama subsequently recycled a similar version in other speeches, including the one in Chicago after he had won the election:

“We have never been just a collection of individuals or a collection of red states and blue states. We are and always will be the United States of America”

Recycling your own material may be acceptable, but there is nothing whatsoever to be gained from recycling material that sounds as though it’s been lifted from someone else – other than the kind electoral disaster Joe Biden experienced when his unattributed use of lines from a Neil Kinnock speech brought his otherwise promising 1987 campaign for the Democratic nomination to an abrupt end.

But Brown and his speechwriters still don’t seem to get it. So, here we are, hardly three weeks since he told the US Congress:

“There is no old Europe, no new Europe, there is only your friend Europe”

we hear him telling the European Parliament:

“There is no old Europe, no new Europe, no east or west Europe. There is only one Europe – our home Europe.”

Pass the sick bag please ...

Daniel Hannan v. Gordon Brown at the European Parliament













Gordon Brown’s speech to the European Parliament yesterday got fairly wide media coverage, but there’s been little or no mention of a powerful response to it by Daniel Hannan, a Tory MEP for South East England.

Less than 24 hours later, Hannan’s speech has had 22,106 viewings on YouTube and has attracted 208 (mostly favourable) comments.* A link to the speech has also already appeared on the page about him on Wikipedia

If evidence were needed that it’s worth posting speeches on YouTube, as I recently suggested the LibDems should be doing (HERE), then this is surely it.

It’s also encouraging to see that at least one young British politician is capable of crafting and delivering an impressive 3 minute speech - and raises the question of why we don't get to see more of the European Parliament on TV.

* UPDATE 4 HOURS LATER: these scores have now gone up to 36,748 viewings and 833 comments.

* UPDATE 10 HOURS LATER: these scores have now gone up to 167,779 viewings and 1,660 comments.

* UPDATE 14 HOURS LATER: these scores have now gone up to 316,779 viewings and 2,787 comments.

* UPDATE 24 HOURS LATER: these scores have now gone up to 660,691 viewings and 4,560 comments.

‘From Stalin to Mr Bean’: putting two parts of a contrast in the most effective order

In case anyone thinks that the last posting was intended as a criticism of Vince Cable’s rhetorical skill, I haven't forgotten that his most famous line came when, as acting leader of the Liberal Democrats, he produced a devastating contrast at Question Time in the House of Commons (see below).

If he had said that Mr Brown ‘had become more like Mr Bean than Stalin’, the contrast between a bumbling fool and an autocratic dictator would still have been there and would no doubt have raised a laugh or two.

But on that occasion, he got the order of the two parts of the contrast the right way round, and not only had a tremendous impact there and then, but also did his own longer term reputation no harm at all.

The line also inspired a purely visual representation of his point on you YouTube that can be seen HERE.

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