I have spent the weekend away from home and therefore missed TV and Radio in its usual format and with the exception of yesterdays newspapers, twitter has been my main source of news. The austerity rally in London which attracted 50,000 people was very evident amongst the people I follow, along with the frustration felt by many of them that the mainstream media had all but ignored it. A tweet this morning suggested that the reason for this was the absence of Nigel Farage. Of course he would have been as welcome at the event as Michael Fabricant at a meeting to discuss violence against women.

The success of UKIP in recent years is undoubtedly partly due to its success at attracting media attention by the skip load. This was recently explained as being due to the assiduous hard work over several years by Nigel and some of his colleagues in engaging with the people who are now responding to his calls and carrying his opinions on the subjects that he judges to be important.

The reason for my disconnect from TV and radio was a sojourn in the Sussex Countryside which meant that even if I had been aware of the austerity rally, I would have not been able to attend. However I cannot recall any specific publicity that alerted me to the event until twitter erupted with the news yesterday. That may simply be as a result of my own focus on other things, or that when information did appear I discounted it because of my own diary. However I have been involved in many events where the news media appeared to have been on a skeleton staff throughout and the sense of accomplishment is tarnished because the hoped for (and pre-arranged) photographer does not arrive. One of the challenges of course is that if one is critical of the media and expresses that too consistently, the capacity to build the sort of relationships with them is diminished. In part I wonder if this is happening to UKIP. Having been built up with the help of the media, as a result of their hard work, they are now reacting very negatively to the poor treatment that they sense they are receiving. This in turn makes it easier for the friendships to be lost. The bright firework may discover that all that goes up, tends to come down, and the bump can be very unpleasant too.

We need a media that is sensitive to the stories which should be told, and one could hope that there would be enough political journalists to ensure that even when Nigel is not invited, that the event is worth attending if the numbers are significant. However we all need to play our part. It may be that amongst the 50,000 in Trafalger Square there were plenty of people who are very good at getting their stories into the local papers. The challenge of transferring that influence to the national media is not small, but it might be possible. As the implications of the Lobbying Bill begin to impact all of us we will need to find new ways of working. There have recently been several attempts by MPs to challenge charities for their ‘political’ views. That sadly is only the tip of an iceberg that will emerge in earnest at the end of September as the 7 month period begins ahead of the General Election 2015. If we are to avoid spending all 7 months defending individual charities, our best hope is for lots of collective responses to the issues which we feel we need to challenge as they appear in parties manifestos. If we want to maximise our impact, there is not a moment to lose in developing good relationships with our national media in such a way that yesterdays news blackout is not repeated.