Sitting here, thinking about our so-seemingly-long-gone election and the French referendum on the proposed EU constitution (with the Dutch voting today), I enjoyed John Naughton's post about Neil Kinnock's Today programme interview (live yesterday, Tuesday):
Talking about the French referendum result, he outlined a cogent case for regarding it as a wholly French-made shambles. He blamed Jacques Chirac for mismanaging the disastrous Nice summit which launched the thing on the world, and pointed out that instead of a simple document setting out the rules needed to make workable an EU of 25 countries, it had ballooned (under the tutelage of Valery Giscard d’Estaing, a former French President) into a bloated half-assed attempt to do for Europe what the Founding Fathers once did for the United States. As for the interpretation that the Non vote was an expression of dissatisfaction with Chirac, Kinnock pointed out that it was the French Left who had put Chirac where he is today. Their failure to agree on, and support, a viable left-wing candidate in the last Presidential election led them in a panic to vote for Chirac in order to keep the fascist Jean Marie le Pen from winning. But on Sunday, those same leftists allied with fascists, racists, Europhobes and sundry discontents to ‘rebuke’ the guy they had installed in power. It was a truly great rant. If only Kinnock had been that sharp when he was Leader of the labour Party.
On Tuesday, the interview could be heard again here on the Today site.
What interested me about this is what Tom Coates and Dan Hill have drawn attention to in posting about the new BCC Download and Podcast trial: it is 'one of those areas where the BBC's traditional mission to explain, demystify and advocate new technology is entirely in line with the need to create useful, usable user experiences' (Dan Hill); 'the move towards "three ways of listening" really excited me and I love the fact that the XML button is clickable and you have a form input box where you can select and copy the URL without accidentally clicking on the XML link and getting a page full of mark-up' (Tom Coates).
