Really? Umm, Suslov was the ideologist, Andropov was head of the KGB.

I’d suggest the absence of daily national newspapers and the BBC gives US blogs the opportunity to be viable.

>hegemonic centralist parties

I choked on that.

>it will happen!

I agree it will. It may not happen mainly through independent bloggers, however.

For what it is worth, my “best guesses” on blogging politicians are:

All MP/MEP/AM etc: perhaps 60-100 active.
All Councillors perhaps 200-250 active bloggers.

The best interaction and debate imo is in Wales, since it is a small enough place that all bloggers can more or less know each other, from MPs and AMs to local individuals.

Scotland could be similar but Scottish Parliament blogging seems thinner on the ground (not sure why – could be that I am ignorant of what is happening). Scotland needs a Slugger to be a fulcrum.

England struggles with size so poliblogging gets Balkanised, and divided by “class” (!), area (especially Westminster village), profile (e.g., national media writers) and party.
Relatively few bloggers get to interact with (e.g.,) national politicians unless there is a relationship first, or they are prominent in one of the above.

For example, I have seen AMs and the occasional Welsh MP, and the odd Scottish politician reading my blog, but very few English equivalents. I think that is largely down to the scale of English poli blogging – too big for most of the bloggers to know each other.

Northern Ireland I don’t really know.

As to politicians who use blogging well – I’d point to some of the Welsh AMs and MPs, and maybe John Redwood for his use of his blog when he was doing the policy review and Tom Watson for the stuff after Civil Serf – provided it feeds through. For the LDs, perhaps Lynne F.

Matt

[47] I agree with your basic point that the British political internet is at a very early stage of development. This is doubtless partly because of the factors you mention, but also I think because of the fear both Labour and Conservatives have of the policies their members would (and in Labour’s case, in the past have) lumber them with! The American system works against hegemonic centralist parties of our type and so creates a greater space for the blogosphere.

I daresay I was wrong about candidates and the internet, got ahead of myself there – it will happen!

The obvious first question is why this post is here not on PB? Did Mike Smithson refuse to let you post it there? If you are raising questions about a community, the place to debate its balance in the first instance is in that community. In my opinion, anyway.

If critics withdraw, of course the balance will go the other way.

>A blog is probably a necessity to-day for anyone who wants to become an MP, and before long that will be true at local Council level, too.

I don’t think you can make that statement until the majority of them have them; at present I don’t think that they do. I’d guess that the number is less than 500 from a total number of MP/MEP/AM/MSP/MIA candidates of more than 5000. The last list of MP blogs I compiled only had about 30 on it.

I think that you are invoking more than a few caricatures, and not really making a case that hangs together:

>Life on-line is a series of fleeting transactions: to the extent that it replaces real-world human relationships it degrades all who engage in it.

That is back to arguments from the mid-1990s. I think you have a false division between “online” and “offliine”; they are both part of real life.

Life online adds new possibilities for meeting people and interaction, rather than destroying old ones (e.g., I know people in Egypt, Sudan, Sri Lanka, India and Australia that I would never have encountered without life online.) If individuals choose to abandon life “offline” in favour of the Internet, that is their decision and is cannot be blamed on cyberspace. I anything that any degradation is self-degradation through misuse of a greater freedom.

>For if the left – broadly defined as anyone who considers rampant individualism to be insufficient for the good life.

I think by that definition the left broadly encompasses something between 95% and 99.9% of the population; I don’t think that even the likes of Mr Question That would defend “Rampant Individualism” – and would strongly affirm the rule of law, the nation state, national defense, open markets and so on – and he’s a member of the Libertarian Party. Perhaps you have a different definition of the term to me?

As somebody roughly on the centre-right, I find the inaccurate stereotypes flying around on the “Liberal-Left” at present rather encouraging for our political future, and promising some good rough and tumble to come !

>And that means going beyond article and comments in hyperspace – it means building real-world networks in localities committed to re-engagement,to the political education function the Parties long ago abandoned.

The problem that I see there is that political (or other) blogs are not suffciently local with a sufficiently dense coverage to achieve anything like that. At the moment the best you will get is something like The Stirrer for Birmingham. I think we are one, if not two, orders of magnitude away from being able to build effective networks in Anytown.

Two signs of hope in this area:

- The experimentations with local blogs and communities by Regional and Community Newspapers (such as in Birmingham where one of the papers has 35 local bloggers, or in ) would be a far better place to start, since they are already genuinely engaged with staff and infrastructure on the ground – political blogging (apart from for a few blogs with Mainstream access) is a niche of politicos arguing with each other consisting of perhaps 100k people in total, including readers.

- And local blogs such as the one in Crewe and Nantwich that covered the By-Election.

On Samizdata etc, I’m not going into detailed stats unless somebody produces some real figures, beyond noting that they are probably in the same ballpark as Dale and Con Home. Imho *no* Uk Political Blogs can be considered to be genuinely large websites – even in blog terms. Hitwise published a list of the top 20 individual blogs with the most UK traffic yesterday – none of them are political blogs and only one of them was British. I’ll post on that later over at the Wardman Wire.

That’s all I’ll say for now.

Matt

The “problem” with PBC turning Tory started after the 2005 General Election, when the press picked up on the site. Because it was linked to betting, there was an assumption that commentary on the site was more in tune with the political actualities than from other, less transparent sources. When this was picked up, naturally politicos from all parties became interested and the Tories turned up in droves.

You used to be able to have a reasoned argument on the site, but nowadays its pretty impossible (a) because of the sheer volume of comments and (b) because anything which veers slightly from “Cameron is an elctoral god and the Tories are headed fro a landslide” gets howled down.

I feel sorry for the real punters; in the “old days” there was much informed and interesting betting comment. No longer …

For a time, it seemed like the site was completely given over to campaigning about 24-week abortion, an issue I don’t have a strong opinion on either way.

Just like certain leftists I’ve encountered, who can’t seem to tell the difference between conservatives, libertarians and ‘fascists’.

It’s all a matter of perspective, innit

So I just don’t bother reading the comments.

John B @ 35: “but the right-wing blogs who get the most attention are still conformist Tories like Ian Dale and ConHome…”

I reckon this is partly a function of the trad Tory herd mentality that thomas refers to, and party due to the fact that those sort of blogs are more easily understandable/accessible by the MSM, and thus they get all the attention from the MSM, and thus it becomes self-perpetuating.

…and when all the anti-Ken crowd were going bananas. Remember the YouGov polls a couple of weeks before the election predicted a much larger Boris lead than the final one (which, indeed, called it), and spread-betting pro-Ken on election day was a profitable activity. Mike spotted all this IIRC.

“my understanding is that Samizdata ( http://www.samizdata.net/blog/ ) dwarfs most (all?) other UK based political blogs in terms of audience by a matter of scale”

…but its readers are mostly in the US, so it doesn’t really count.

“the left-right distinction online has shifted to more clearly reflect conformist-nonconformist divisions”

Which way round are you talking here? I mean, ChickYog and DK agree on more than they disagree, and Guido hates everyone, but the right-wing blogs who get the most attention are still conformist Tories like Ian Dale and ConHome…

Don’t read the comments – there are hundreds of them anyway.

Mr Smithson’s views always seem very sensible and to the (polling/betting) point.

He was certainly able to give a proper perspective on YouGov during the London elections for example while all the pro-Ken crowd were going bananas, and consistently pointed to the pre-handover polling evidence that Brown would be a loser.

Still a very useful and interesting site.

I’d say the left is more anti-statist than the right.

Hohoho

On that grounds the anti-conservative (liberal) or non-right (left-liberal) causes would benefit from the use of dissimilar methods as their competitive difference, something samizdata instinctively does.

HOwever, I still think it is as easy to overestimate the dominance of the whipping hand as it is to underestimate an underdog.

I am not a Tory, but it doesn’t suprise me that the Tories would acquiese to a popular institution which, while leaving low income people worse off in terms of health outcomes, is quite good at dealing with middle class complaints.

A transaction would be an improvement on the current manegerialist version of the NHS and its original incarnation as a monopolised doctor-controlled organisation where the medical establishment decided whatever treatment was appropriate. Before the NHS was created, friendly societies and unions would contract doctors on behalf of their working class members. The doctors had to treat those members as clients/customers, in other words with the respect of someone who is responsible for their salary. The NHS put a stop to that and thus helped to entrench middle class hegemony over the rest. Now the NHS can deny people prompt treatment on the grounds of lifestyle, which disproportionately impacts on the poor. This wouldn’t have happened under a market system.

But on the blogging point, my understanding is that Samizdata ( http://www.samizdata.net/blog/ ) dwarfs most (all?) other UK based political blogs in terms of audience by a matter of scale, even Dale and Guido. I don’t have figures to hand but I think this makes sense for the new medium as the contributors are mostly non-party political and stridently anti-collectivist. They are not tribally right wing, however, despite the gun in their iconography as they have No2Id’s Guy Herbert as a regular contributor who is very much at home on the liberal left. Of course, the audience is more international but to an extent that just helps place the UK as a broadcaster of the new liberalism that the net can foster.