There are certainly better things to hate MPs for.

Respectfully,

Ben

MPs have rivals. Pressure groups, newspapers, think tanks, commercial lobbies and business interests, civil servants, NGOs and so on and on and on. None of them are subjet to a commensurate level of scrutiny.

If I were to crawl all over you picking at petty shit like this and were to not place the same restrictions on your rivals, you would rightly think that I had it in for you.

All of this obsession with the Westminster Village is petty anti-democratic anti-politics.

Is it OK for an MP to use their official website to “promote” their political blog?
What level is OK?
Should they even be linking to it?
Is it OK to have a link in the header, and vice-versa from the blog?
Is it OK to have a subdomain of the main “official” website domain that is mapped to a blogging platform?

How many MPs are out there who are using their incidental expenses allowance to promote their websites including (to various degrees) political blogs without telling us?

Is Dorries’ mistake that she put the statement about “incidental expenses provision” on her website?
Is it a requirement to do so?

I can’t find many other MP websites with clear funding information (open to clarification on that as I have only checked a small sample).

Matt

Is the real question here that we need to rethink the dividing line between “MP office” matters and “MP party political” matters?

Is it OK for an MP to write for a “political blog” (or a party political post for their “MP website” – they all do it) in “work” time?

Where’s this going? Is it actually the aim to turn Nad into a walking talking political joke like George Galloway?

Matt

In any case, I think this is irrelevant. I would have thought the the definition of a website was something like a consistent, interrelated set of pages under a common domain. Wikipedia’s page on the subject suggests a website is largely defined by a common home page. The intention is surely one of a logically consistent set of pages, and not some irrelevant issues of IP addressing.

I’d freely admit that there is probably no case law covering what does or does not constitute a single website. However, the automatic assumption that the resolution of two different DNS names to a common IP address is not valid. The only thing you can say is that the network request is terminating on a common device somewhere. It may be a common server, it may be a network load balancer.

The real issue is surely who’s paying for what – politicians are always using taxpayers money to further their own political messages, whether overtly or indirectly. The costs of a simple web hosting site are, in the big picture, trivial and there are surely bigger fish to fry. If you want a target, then pick on the messages and real abuse. This is a sideshow using some fairly naive assumptions.

Mid-Beds would be ideal territory for a LibDem decapitation campaign; it would surely be easier to corral all the anti-Dorries support behind a LibDem rather than a Labour candidate, given that there are far more LibDem than Labour voters if the results from the last district council elections are anything to go by. I’m sure there must be a capable candidate living in the area and that the good Lord Rennard and his team of crack by-election shocktroops won’t find it necessary to import any eccentric cat ladies or yachtsmen to contest the seat!

That way, we can hopefully stop her constituency being such a safe Tory seat and alert more people to the fact that a person as unqualified for the job she’s doing, is doing the job she’s doing.

It isn’t our fault if the woman is a dishonest, deceitful, misogynist and thoroughly unpleasant individual, is it?

And it is in the public interest for anyone who might be thinking of voting for her to be informed of the evidence for that.

On the other hand, we should be grateful for people like her, as providing very good reasons not to ever vote Tory. If she and others like her weren’t such hateful dunderheads, they might be able to spin their way to power…

The BNP argument is spot on, and actually, I think we should go on incessantly about the woman, until everyone in the land has got the message loud and clear.

But to use a bureaucratic procedural point to do so would seem to be soooooo pre-blog.

My point is that MPs are hedged in by a huge web of stupid procedural rules that are – in themselves – anti-democratic.

With her, it’s easy enough to play the ball. You don’t need to play the … er … man (oh, you know what I mean). I posted that rant earlier in this thread mainly because I think that the centrality of representative democracy to every aspiration that the centre-left has is hugely under-recognised, and stupid rules about MPs communications are an obvious symptom of it.

Sunny, I believe that the time has surely come for you to start taking yourself, your status as the spokesperson for a generation and for the liberal left, and the whole world of blogging seriously. You are treating it with a cavalier indifference and it offers so many possibilities to a man of your talents.

I think I can speak on behalf of anyone that has ever been rude to you in offering my heartfelt apologies.

The people of mad Beds will vote for her even more now because she’s a high-profile public figure…

Possibly… or they might find out she’s publishing hoax pictures and trying to pass it on as a legitimate part of a debate… and that she has very dubious friends.

* shrug *

I’m not in a good mood tonight, and probably should not be engaging in debate. I’ll leave this to people less apt to fly off the handle, I think.

The thing is, we’re just adding to her publicity, aren’t we?

Isn’t that a little like saying we’ll fight against racism without ever mentioning the BNP?

Altho I come a bit unstuck here as well. Can hardly tell others what not to write, can i now. that’s censorship and would do my head in if the favour was returned. dunno which way is up anymore, really.

I think the feeling is that we can focus too much on mainstream obsessions, and Dorries is a mainstream obsession, because she plays so utterly to the middle ground.

If she wants to attack other politicians on flimsy grounds, she can.

If they want to attack her back, they can.

If she wants to host fantasies, she can.

If you want to expose those fantasies, you can.

If she wants to attack women MPs over abortion, she can.

If she wants to make baseless allegations about how her rivals conduct parliamentary business, she can.

There are over 600 other MPs who can contradict her using the same medium if they want to.

When MPs like her start to understand how the internet is read and used as a communications tool, I suspect that she’ll stop doing it anyway.

The state-funding of something that is almost (or IS completely) free is an irrelevant sideshow.

It is time for liberals to start standing up for liberal democracy. It is not time for brown people to turn Tory.

Yeah, well – fair point in some ways. I do talk a lot of shit, especially when it’s convenient.

That said, my mate Unity HAS asked for a strong womanly lead from a strong womanly type on the direction we should take on the abortion debate. I’d rather we put Evan Harris’ pro-choice amendments at the top of the agenda, so that’s what I said. I also tend to agree with Paulie’s point about MPs’ communication expenses. It’s political point-scoring that tends to detract from the bigger arguments. Entertaining, but who gives a stiff one, really. The money we spend butchering Iraqis concerns me more.

Which is not to say people should stop writing about whatever they want. Censorship is bullshit.

Think I’m totally digging a hole here. Enjoying it, though.

Hate to piss on your chips Paulie, but for somewho wants bloggers to stop being so nasty and more constructive, maybe ppl in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones…

It’s a fundamentally anti-democratic obsession and it’s not something that should (or ultimately will) give any comfort to left-leaning politicians or their suppoters. It may be against the rules, but the rules are idiotic. If you are an MP and you are given an allowance to communicate with people, you should spend it how you like.

It’s not as if anyone is goin to go to a Tory MPs website and say to themselves, “You know, I’ve voted Labour all of my life, but that bit of explicitly party political content, especially the political campaigns and the content which denigrates political opponents has completely turned my head and I’m voting Conservative now”, is it?

MPs have a vast aray of competitors. Not counting the twats that constantly demand referendums on everything, there are the dishonest lazy journalists, well-heeled pressure groups, commercial lobbyists and their customers, the civil servants, and other substrata of society that are subject to no restrictions and no scrutiny on how they conduct themsleves and how they communicate. In most cases, they are unscrutinised because it’s difficult or impossible to scrutinise them.

MPs on the other hand are constant and easy targets. Can anyone make the case that liberal democracy has got any better now that we can scrutinse the behavour of politicians more closely?

If this site wants to establish it’s liberal and democratic credentials, could you possibly find ONE regular poster that is prepared to regularly support the only position that has consistantly delivered progressive liberal democratic values – the strong independent body of elected representatives in parliament?

Nitpicking about politicians is Guido’s work. Guido, and his useful idiots….