Bradshaw and Cameron: Why attacking Twitter comments is bad for politics

Ben Bradshaw is the latest Twittering MP to get into trouble.

Here's what he said:

'The camerons got good nhs care thanks to Labour's investment and reform. is this the "big government" he derides?'

The thrust of the Telegraph's story was that Bradshaw was making political hay out of the death of David Cameron's son Ivan earlier this year.

Throughout his speech at the Tory conference last week, Cameron made continual references to "big government", clearly aiming to take the widely held belief that the public sector is bloated and turn it into a bogeyman for Labour in the forthcoming election.

Bradshaw's tweet in response appears to set out to argue that the Camerons wouldn't have received such good treatment on the NHS (the Camerons did praise the doctors and nurses who helped them at the time) had Labour not operated "big government" within the NHS.

That's codswallop. The NHS has improved massively under Labour but it hasn't been money well spent. If someone suffers depression, they might go and see a GP, who is paid for by the local primary care trust. That GP may decide mental health treatment is required, at which point the local mental health trust will get involved. That patient may then have to go and see a shrink, probably paid for by the PCT from the mental health trust and probably housed at the local hospital, run by a separate hospitals trust. All of which is managed by a regional strategic health authority which in turn reports to Government.

The Government, in turn, pays money directly to the PCT to commission services from the mental health trust, NHS hospitals and the private sector, and it'll also pay the GPs. The SHA will try and direct how the PCT should behave, taking government policy forward. That's big government at its worst. Each trust has a chief executive, a board of directors, lots of paper-shufflers, some of whom find their jobs are pretty much entirely about dealing with the other trusts involved.

So Cameron is right. Big government doesn't equal better services. But people aren't criticising Bradshaw for his opinion on the NHS - they're having a go for bringing Ivan into the equation.

Had Bradshaw seized on Cameron's praise for the NHS in looking after his son, then he's be deserving of the criticism.

But Cameron took a calculated call last week to remind us of the death of his son, to tell us the impact it had had on his life, and to say:

But for me and Samantha this year will only ever mean one thing. When such a big part of your life suddenly ends nothing else - nothing outside - matters. It's like the world has stopped turning and the clocks have stopped ticking. And as they slowly start again, weeks later, you ask yourself all over again: do I really want to do this? You think about what you really believe and what sustains you.

There was no obvious reasons for mentioning it, but mention it he did. And at that point, he's opened up his life and is using it to connect with the public. That makes it political.

Just as Tony Blair made his family political when he paraded them on the steps of Number 10 in 1997: Here I am, just like you. Honest.

So was Bradshaw wrong to mention Ivan? In fairness, he didn't. He referenced the Camerons' experience of the NHS.

All he did was reference two parts of the same speech and previous comments made by Cameron.

That to me isn't insensitive, it's making a political point. A political point which deserves to be challenged because it's wrong. Criticising Bradshaw for making the comment is a victory for style over substance - when it's really the substance which needs correcting.

And without Twitter, and that instant comment, we'd perhaps not have realised just how wedded to a bloated public sector Labour really is.