I agree, I’m not sure what point you’re trying to make Dave S, wrt Tom and the Compass left.

You said I was trying to split the left when I attacked John Pilger for his stupidity, and now you’re happily trying to portray the centre left as sell-outs. That’s a touch hypocritical isn’t it?
I think its pretty obvious to me, though maybe not to you, that if the left wants to regain more control within the Labour party then they have to engage and put our their ideas.

Very harsh Dave. I’ve turned up to my fair share of demos and the like, spent plenty of time and money doing things for various pressure groups, and I’m also active on behalf of my local party (I’m an activist for Labour as well as within it, and I have absolutely no shame in admitting it). I think that your definition of activist is arbitrarily narrow, and that this is rather revealing.

I think Simon Fletcher is left on the basis of the opinions he holds. I’d say the same about Ken (and of course point out that they’re not the same person); been reading any of his socialist economics stuff? How about his foreign policy things? And as for his mayoralty, he has been far more green and generally left under the remit of his powers (renationalising London overground, Oyster cards… remember how radical and controversial C-charge was at the time? Opposition to terminal 3? How about the porsche and 4×4 issues? Venezuelan oil? a New Labourite would have been too cowardly or generally mistaken done any of these things). Ken, for me, is clearly left of the central line within Labour (though of course I share your view on some of his dealings with the city, and in part on the RMT – often stupid strikes, but stupid responses from Ken).

I don’t understand how I am any more ‘self-promoting’ than you, or indeed any other person who runs a blog. I have views I like to get off my chest, and a means to broadcast them. That’s about it.

Further to this, in my interpretation, your comment is designed to wound rather than to make any serious point, and I believe it to be beneath you, particularly as you are extremely competent at making arguments without having to resort to that sort of chatter.

This is the second time you’ve attacked me on a personal level, despite me having done nothing of the sort to provoke it.

Once again my New Year’s non-sectarianism resolution hangs perilously close to the edge.

(

I wish I wasn’t such a bed-wetting, do-gooding PC Brigadier at times, I really do.

I understand that knowing what you’re on about isn’t a prerequisite for entering into political debate, but it probably should be.

” so what in particular is objectionable: why would anyone want to defend the right to be abusive?”

And there we have it. What is objectionable is that you prefer to censor people’s views (because you don’t like them) rather than a) engage with them or b) let them wither in the full glare of public opinion if they are abusive.

It is easy to defend views you happen to agree with. The bigger test is whether you are prepared to defend those you don’t.

And the comments policy here goes much much further than “abusive”. Sarcasm is apparently a hate crime along with silliness. These are such loose terms that frankly they can mean anything you want them to. And this is VERY New Labour, Sunny Hundal. Its the same problem as local councils using ant-terrorism laws to snoop on people’s bins. Authoritarian policies expand to fill the space made available to them, that is why they are in principle bad. “Unintended consequences” doesn’t begin to describe their malign effect.

Its your blog, you can do exactly what you want. But if you close your ears and hum loudly when you hear things you don’t like, if you get very prescriptive about what is or isn’t “acceptable” then a) you are illiberal and b) you can’t complain and whinge when your blogs and other social media outlets are less popular than those on the right which (generally) are much less concerned with policing the thoughts and utterances of its contributors.

Create another echo chamber for all I care but don’t act all mystified when it impacts your ability to connect with the UK population.

I’m not interested in an ‘ideologically pure’ or ‘smaller’ party. It is my firm belief that the arguments of the anti-capitalist, anti-statist, socialist Left will carry people simply because they are the only accurate way of explaining and understanding and evalutating the events which shape the social relations from which so many of us derive ‘common sense’ understandings. If I didn’t believe that, I wouldn’t be a socialist.

Yet that very belief, which explains how ‘common sense’ opinions are just as ideological as the most ultra-Left Spart rants, demands more than a mere ‘argument’ – it demands a structural engagement, with the strategic objective being the destruction of the in-built, institutional bias in favour of pro-capitalist politics. Whether that be the mainstream media or the wealth-driven PR apparatus which feeds it, the politico-bureaucracy derived from the elite universities or the most powerful businesses and their union-busting strategies, it doesn’t matter.

Our efforts to engage with these questions wander off into specialist vocabulary, that’s true enough – but the more political the environment in which people have grown up and live, the more political their vocabulary, the more capable of grappling with these concepts. Not for nothing has the word “capitalism” fallen out of favour (until recently) with media outlets, in favour of the seemingly less ideological word “economy”. Yet this drive to depoliticisation is itself political; it is an expression of the victory of the Right over the Left.

Our immediate goal is to reverse that – and if we start small, with limited audiences, or using ill-fitting practices that no longer have reach, it is because we’re working from a deficit built up by eighteen years of Thatcherite monetarism and ten years of Blairite Thatcherism. This ‘free market’ concept is rubbish; the market of ideas is far from being free: even the internet does not make the transfer of ideas free – and those things which are discussed by the free blogs are often derived from a source with a vested interest, whether directly from an MSM editor or indirectly from a puff piece put out by paid PR consultants, using contacts they made at Oxford or Cambridge or Durham or Bristol.

In the meantime, the subject wasn’t the deficiency of the Left blogosphere, it was the smugness of the Right.

I think that LabourList has made a big mistake in employing Schillings to stifle criticisms.

_____________

It’s amazing how rightwing bloggers think we give a toss about what they think of us.

Humourless? Someone has to say it… Guido’s just not funny. Just being a nasty bitch isn’t humour, people. I know, I’m absolutely hilarious. Just ask my wife.

And did he learn nothing from the DD for me leadership campaign car crash?

http://www.nextleft.org/2009/01/is-it-because-she-is-tory.html

Stop confusing us with New Labour.

And other thing is – I’m not interested in a jokey website. You want jokes, go to Melanie Phillips’ blog! All right-wing blogs do is whine, what’s so funny on ConservativeHome?

I’m a libertarian conservative voter. I know Maggie signed us up to Mastrict and brought in the Police and Criminal evidence Act in 1984 (plus amendments) but overall they offer a smaller state option and as such offer greater freedom from state control (in my opinion).

You lot are rather serious. Be a bit more offensive, less PC, hey why not use your right to free speech as far as you can before they install a chinese firewall on the web.

I find this site interesting but not entertaining. I think it’s because you can kind of agree with some things that a conspiracy theorist screen licker on the right might say but few would agree with an extreme left/communist viewpoint. Of the two extremes the right wing nutter is prefereable to the stalinist pig to most of the UK population………….But then I fall into my own right wing/left wing trap by accident….

thanks for responding in the way the post was intended. To your points, I think you are giving the Beeb far too much credit. There is an acknowledged left wing bias at the Corporation, and it is not going to just evaporate when the Tories get in. The BBC shouldn’t even operate some sort of swinging bias, it should be neutral which is what people pay for.

Sunny:

Noted matey.

And, success is measured in how many people you reach with your message. Listening to people on this thread saying that it would be succesful to have a smaller, but more ideologically pure, audience is like listening to the Labour Party in the early 80s saying it was happy to be in opposition without any power as long as it was ideologically pure. Pointless.

At its heart the Left seems to despise ordinary people. They are ideologically suspect. The Left describes them as “vulnerable” but what they mean is that they want the ideologues and the state bureaucrats to take from them their freedom to decide for themselves so that the decisions can be made according to “acceptable” ideology.

This is at the heart of the failure of the Left to prosper online.

The online world is a wonderful free market of ideas. If you don’t know how to operate in a free market, because you have ideological problems with it, you are going to find it hard to attract people who have complete freedom to choose which site to visit.

Most Left Wing blogs and sites are the online equivalents of Eastern Bloc factories that would make shoes with the heels on the toes. There was no real and meaningful contact with the customer that enables a virtuous feedback loop. Enclosing yourself in an ideologically pure bubble in the way that most Leftish sites, and it seems LabourList want to, will only result in the equivalent of an Eastern bloc factory.

Change that and you will win. Trouble is, you would have to change your political ideology too.

No, if they peddled racist conspiracy theories in a mainstream paper they’d still be batshit crazy, regardless of political affiliation. It just happens a lot more on the right. Furthermore, just to let you know all your further comments will be deleted, as they were in the past.

No more than Rik Mayall in the Young Ones

They wouldn’t blog and/or comment otherwise!!

I spend as much time arguing with my own side, by which I mean the Left, as I do arguing with the Right (whether Tory, New Labour or whatever). In answer to your question, then, I’m not interested in votes – I’m interested in the arguments. On the doorsteps, I’ve met a small percentage of people with ultra-Catholic, even very racist worldviews who either vote Labour or who previously voted Labour and have decided to move on to the BNP. I suppose an unprincipled type would simply say “thank you very much” to those who were going to vote his way – but I’ve always argued the case. One elderly Irish gent living in Blackbird Leys threw me off his property because I said that the Labour Party doesn’t welcome homophobics.

When I talk about trolls I’m referring to people who won’t move the argument along. On “Though Cowards Flinch” now and again I get BNP supporters protesting my support of the No Platform policy of the NUS and the main political parties. They simply won’t let go of the notion that it’s about free speech, no matter what argument is thrown their way. They can’t beat the arguments to the contrary, they merely ignore them, sling a few ad hominem attacks and continue declaiming on the hypocrisy of the Left in standing for free speech for everyone except fascists.

Agree or disagree with that point of view, and I know some of you will agree, if the Left genuinely believes it is not a matter of free speech since it does not involve the powers of the state, then the Left is not hypocritical. You can assert that the Left doesn’t genuinely believe that, which changes the argument, or you can ignore the point and continue down a propagandist road. The latter is simply trolling; mouth open, mind not. I enjoy discussion – and I frequent a number of sites with views that oppose my own, and on my site people will have heard praise of Hayek, Popper, Berlin and other authors not of my view. They won’t hear much about the adherents of Ayn Rand or the Cato Institute.

On the matter of smugness, do I come across as smug? I’m not pleased with myself. I think, on the other hand, that Iain Dale is – and I think the content of the article I linked to, in CiF, which sparked this whole debate, backs up my point. Now Dale might claim that this means I’m up my own arse, but actually one doesn’t have to be uptight to react in an irritated fashion to the verbose and pompous swaggerings of those apparatchik wannabes of both Labour and Conservative. Dale has caught my ire this time around, but it could just as easily have been NOLS, which I’d happily drop-kick into the sea.