This is a contribution to the Liberal Conspiracy Mission Series

Sunny wants to build Liberal Conspiracy with more political strategy, activism and news. But it is not just content that he is after. What Sunny is attempting is ambitious, important for British blogland and on-line publishing and for OurKingdom, as we prepare a relaunch. He’s written three posts. I commented briefly on the first.

Liberal Conspiracy is immensely creative and refreshing. As well as tackling issues and being smart and forthright, it goes about things in a different way from your average lefty or liberal blog. It looks outwards to what is happening not inwards to what ‘line’ it should be taking. With this new development Sunny is trying to get us all to think with a similarly fresh spirit about our methods and how we resource them in the coming era of citizen journalism. continue reading… »

Sunny has been running a series of posts on where he wants to take Liberal Conspiracy [part 1, part 2 and part 3]. What has piqued my interest is the response this sort of action draws from the rightwing blogosphere.

Mr Eugenides commented very even handedly on Sunny’s last piece and I think it is worth responding.
He says: (this is an extract):

Tory blogs have tried to emulate the campaigning style of online leftwing campaigns – #Kerryout, for example – and by and large we don’t do it very well. I myself have taken part in some campaigns – for the Gurkhas, Iraqi interpreters, free speech online – and it’s noticeable that many of them have been organised and pushed from the left – I have sometimes been, if not the token Tory, then at least one of a relative few.

I’m sure there’s a thesis to be written on this somewhere down the line, but I think the bottom line is this; that while a small part of me wishes you luck (and another, much larger part, hopes that all attempts to “destroy the right” end in ignominious failure), I can’t help thinking that a loosely-focused left-wing blog is going to have difficulty making an impact in our politics because – unlike Conservative Home – LC doesn’t represent a recognisable consituency that politicians need to pander to.

First of all, I think there is a constituency Liberal Conspiracy can tap into, and one which has been abandoned since 1997.
continue reading… »

In my sporadic LC Mission Series, I’m trying to lay out some thoughts on what I think the Left’s approach should be to political parties as well as politics in general. As well as have a discussion around the point of political blogging and online activism of course. As always – you are all welcome to chip in with your thoughts.

In the first part I talked about the need for infrastructure. In the second, a need for taking a different approach to politics – more like that of an outside insurgency.

I want to press home the first point again and explain what I mean. Sometimes there’s no point just saying something – you just have to do it and see how it works out.

The point of blogging
I’m sick of opinion blogging. Everyone has an opinion and frankly it all gets very repetitive eventually. Plus, lefties love writing long articles when a short, punchy one-liner will do.
continue reading… »

Late last year I was invited to speak by the Oxford University Libdems. This is an edited version of what I said, and seeps into much of my thinking.

In 2003 a political operative in the US by the name of Rob Stein made a series of presentations on how conservatives in the US had, over a period of thirty years, built a “message machine” and spent around $300 million a year to promote its agenda.

According to the New York Times the presentations were made to rich political entrepreneurs with a clear message: stop thinking in terms of politics in terms of elections, and focus more on building an infrastructure to support and build political ideas they liked.

Rob Stein wanted to point out how long term investment to ensure that in 10-20-30 years time, the Democrats would be the dominant political force instead of the Republicans.

I’m making this point here, today, in front of this audience, because you may be the future of the Liberal Democrats. And I think it’s time the liberal-left, of which you may be a part of, embraced the necessity and importance of insurgency politics.
continue reading… »

I haven’t gotten around to starting my long-planned debate on the future of LibCon and unveil some new parts of the site as I promised. Hopefully later this week.

But I wanted to repeat one or two quick points I made the other night at the debate at Westminster Skeptics event on political blogging.

Put aside the false dichotomy that Nick Cohen set up by saying bloggers don’t do any proper investigations. I gave about 6 examples and had plenty more to offer. Nick Cohen talking on a subject he clearly knows little about shock. The real debate is actually about how differently the more popular blogs view their ‘model’.

Here is how I see it.
continue reading… »

I’ve been asked to speak at the Progressive London conference this Saturday, on the subject of how blogs and social media will affect the political climate and maybe even the upcoming election.

You may have read a fair bit on the growing prominence of leftwing blogs recently and, where the analysis has come from right-wing bloggers, most of it has been horse-shit. Lefties have been making a lot of noise recently on blogs and Twitter – I won’t deny that. But much has been speculation and back-scratching rather than straightforward strategic planning and thinking.

My talk at Progressive London will be the first attempt to lay out some thoughts on where LibCon could go and how. Next week from Monday I’m going to write some thoughts here on our editorial policy, how the left needs to do things differently and how we could prepare for a Tory government.

New Labour may be in power and the Tories may think lefties control the establishment, but make no mistake: we are on the outskirts. We are not the establishment. We face a tightly organised conservative machine, aided by a growing group of front organisations, that further the Tory agenda. It’s time we became more unashamedly partisan about our agenda.

I don’t know of any other blog that gets so many right-wingers coming on to say what they think should be published or what we shouldn’t write about. This blog isn’t for a “balanced debate” and neither is it for right-whingers. It is here to reflect the broad range of left-wing thinking and to promote others to build a new left-wing movement. More on this on Saturday and next week.

contribution by Ed Wallis

The Fabian Review New Year special is out now, and it previews the major political schisms of a pivotal political year.

Whatever the outcome of this year’s election, the air is going to be thick with renewal. James Crabtree has some interesting advice in the magazine for lefties seeking the next big thing: don’t bother.

“Hoping for a British Obama to turn up is even less likely than wishing for some kind of super-charged Geoff Mulgan-on-steroids to dream up an entirely new vision of social democracy.”
continue reading… »

2009 year was a tremendous year for LibCon – well, our second year since launching in Nov 2007. Our visitor figures doubled and we hosted a tremendous range of debate on the blog, and attracted comment across other blogs.

The most notable trend is perhaps how social media is becoming an increasingly important space where people post links and have debates.
continue reading… »

The schadenfreude becomes stale quite quickly, doesn’t it? No sooner had the whoops of glee at Simon Cowell’s failure to reach the Christmas Number 1 spot for the fifth consecutive year, and the many ironies of the Rage Against the Machine campaign were clear for all to see. First amongst these is the fact that R.A.t.M.’s angry Killing in the Name and Joe McElderry’s saccharine version of The Climb were Sony Music records: Joe is on Simco Records (i.e. Simon Cowell) “under exclusive licence to Sony Music Entertainment UK Ltd” while Rage Against The Machine’s label is Epic, a subsidiary of Sony.

The campaign put a small dent into Simon Cowell’s sales figures. Last year, Alexandra Burke’s Hallelujah sold 576,000 copies in the week before Christmas, while this year Joe McElderry only managed 450,000. But this hardly suggests that Cowell’s business model is on the wane – Leon Jackson only sold 275,000 copies of his single, When You Believe in 2007. Cowell knows that a bit of controversy is good for his bottom line. He knows that the label ‘Christmas Number One’ is an entirely relative marketing concept anyway, and modern music history is littered with classic hits which never reached that false summit.

So although the Facebook campaigners for Rage Against the Machine were successful, I can’t help thinking that there is something confused about the campaign and its aims. They say:

… it’s given many others hope that the singles chart really is for everybody in this country of all ages, shapes, and sizes…and maybe re-ignited many people’s passion for the humble old single as well as THAT excitement again in actually tuning in to the chart countdown on a Sunday.

In taking this line, the campaigners seem to be endorsing the Singles Chart as an appropriate indicator of good and popular music, when it is manifestly nothing of the sort. Yes, they reclaimed the ‘excitement’ for a single week… but they did so with a seventeen year-old song which was chosen precisely for its contrast with its competitor. That is entirely different from what the campaigners have nostalgia for – new music from good bands, battling it out. Former chart battles were essentially a positive contest, with music fans buying their favourite record. The 2009 campaign had an entirely negative “anyone by Cowell” message, which is unsustainable.

False Metrics

Modern internet campaigns often seem to fall into the trap of chasing targets based on false metrics. The campaign for Gary McKinnon (the computer hacker in danger of extradition to the US) seems to be a victim:

lets make #mckinnonmonday ‘trend’ – TWEET4GARY NOW !!! please tweet ALL #american friends and ask them to help #FREEGARY #garyMckinnon
- @cliffsul

The aim of #mckinnonmonday is to make Gary McKinnon trend #garymckinnon Pls RT
- @dandelion101

Shouldn’t the aim be to generate anger and interest in the Gary McKinnon story? How helpful is all the constant RT’ing if it doesn’t translate to bodies at the protest, letters in the politician’s in-tray.

And it is not just impoverished grassroots campaigners falling into this trap, either. Here is a recent tweet from a Cabinet Minister:

Support #welovetheNHS, add a #twibbon to your avatar now! – http://twibbon.com/join/welovetheNHS

Admittedly, sending the tweet is hardly a burden on Mr Milband’s resources, but its odd and disturbing that politicians and political campaigns have started to relate to us in this way. The idea that the NHS is something to love is presumed, and the campaign becomes about forming a huge group of people around a slogan for a fleeting moment only. Did anyone capture the e-mail addresses of those who tweeted #welovetheNHS? If not then it seems like a wasted moment.

And as for Twibbons? This innovation seems to me to be a hugely reductive exercise, shrinking political debate to a space 100 pixels wide.

Now, lest you assume I am engaging in pure snark, I should point out that I am as guilty of this hashtag chasing as the next person – perhaps more so. I helped the Burma Campaign devise their 64forSuu.org project, which was, frankly, all about the hashtag. And only today I’ve written a press release lauding the fact that PEN’s Libel Reform petition has just reached 10,000 signatures, a figure that will something only if it serves to light a fire under either Jack Straw or Dominic Grieve.

Its very easy to raise ‘awareness’ of any given issue, but that’s not the same thing as establishing a consensus that what you are proposing is right. And in turn, that is not the same thing as actually motivating people to action. It would be a great shame if “taking action” became synonymous with simply sharing links and joining endless Facebook groups, because when that “action” fails to translate into meaningful change, we will only find that another generation have been turned off politics, disillusioned. The Obama campaign has been criticised recently for its rather top-down approach to twitter, which didn’t really engage in conversation with supporters. But nevertheless, he actually inspired people out of their houses and into the campaign HQs. Did some of us think that Twitter could start a revolution in Iran? Not quite (as Jay Rosen points out). While the #IranElection tag on Twitter has been a useful tool for the protesters and for those reporting on the crisis it is clearly the people on the ground that will really put that regime under pressure (and we hope that the passing of Ayatollah Hoseyn Ali Montazeri will provide inspiration to renew that pressure).

All of which is to say that George Monbiot’s sanctimonious article this morning had the ring of truth about it:

For the past few years good, liberal, compassionate people – the kind who read the Guardian – have shaken their heads and tutted and wondered why someone doesn’t do something. Yet the number taking action has been pathetic. Demonstrations which should have brought millions on to the streets have struggled to mobilise a few thousand. As a result the political cost of the failure at Copenhagen is zero. Where are you?

We’ve been tweeting #hashtags and adding #twibbons to our avatar, George. Get with the programme, yeah?

Sunny’s busy elsewhere at the moment, so I guess I’d better take on the news that the North London Central Mosque’s libel action against Tory think-tank, Policy Exchange, has been struck out by Justice Eady, leaving the trustees of the mosque facing a £75,000 legal bill just to cover PX’s legal bills.

The case related to allegations made in a 2007 report by Denis McEoin, ‘The Hijacking of British Islam’, which was withdrawn earlier this year, at the same time as it issued this apology to one of the organisations named in the report as allegedly selling extremist literature.

The Hijacking of British Islam:
Al-Manaar Muslim Cultural Heritage Centre

In this report we state that Al-Manaar Muslim Cultural Heritage Centre is one of the Centres where extremist literature was found. Policy Exchange accepts the Centre’s assurances that none of the literature cited in the Report has ever been sold or distributed at the Centre with the knowledge or consent of the Centre’s trustees or staff, who condemn the extremist and intolerant views set out in such literature. We are happy to set the record straight.

The key phrase in this piece of news seems to be ’struck out’, which gives no clues whatsoever as to the reason that the mosque’s libel action failed. As yet, there’s nothing on BAILI relating to this case, so whether it failed on a technicality, or because the mosque was unable to put forward a viable case, or even because Justice Eady decided that the mosque has no reputation to defend is anyone’s guess.

I must admit to being a little disappointed that this case failed to all the way to a full hearing, not because I really give a toss about either side winning or losing but because it might have shed just a little bit more light on the circumstances that resulted in McEoin incorporating fabricated evidence in his report. continue reading… »

In response to Unity’s letter and petition posted earlier this week on LibCon, the PCC’s new chair Baroness Peta Buscombe has already responded to me by email. I publish the full letter below and a response below that.

It’s worth emphasising that at this point we haven’t yet sent off the letter. You can still sign it on the earlier thread and make suggestions.

* * * * * *

18th November 2009
Dear Mr Hundal

Thank you for your letter about my apparent proposal to regulate the blogosphere. I know you are intending to send it to me on Friday, but – given that it is already being commented on – I thought I’d respond right away. It is useful to have the chance to clarify what I was saying to Ian Burrell.
continue reading… »

As you may have either seen on the Indy’s website, or picked up on from Mark’s commentary on her speech to the Society of Editors, Baroness Buscombe, the new Chair of the Press Complaints Commission, has been making noises about extending the PCC’s remit to cover blogs and blogging.

In the past, when this kind of thing has been mooted, the typical response has been one of  lots of blog-shouting of the ‘you’ll have to take my blog out of my cold dead hands’ variety. This time around I thought we might take a different approach and write directly to the PCC setting out one of the key practical reasons why PCC regulation would be a bad idea – which of, us, after all, wants to be seen to working to the ethical standards of the MSM when, with a few exceptions, these are so much lower than our own.

So, with that firmly in mind, I’ve drafted a collective response to the Baroness’s suggestion for you all to chew over, one that any active bloggers can sign-up to by leaving your name (real or online) and details of the your blog (title/link) in comments.

Comments on the text and any suggestions for amendments or additional matters to include are, of course, welcome – this is a blog not a newspaper after all.

At the end of this week, I’ll transfer any sign-ups to the letter and get it shipped off to the PCC, DCMS and Commons CMS committee.

UPDATE – Oh, and don’t pay too much attention to the time-stamp on this post – it was actually posted at 11:49am on 17th November but will be time-shifted, over next few days to, keep it visible in the left-hand side bar on the front page, so don’t worry that a lot of comments might appear to pre-date the post.

<— Letter Starts Here —>

continue reading… »

Will Straw at Left Foot Forward published an astonishing story the other day. He said:

An employee of the Conservative party has used a fake name and email address to comment on a Left Foot Forward guest post about anti-semitism in Poland.

You won’t be surprised to hear that the comment was typically of the “so what?” kind that sought to play down Michal Kaminski’s background. Just the kind we’ve also been getting a lot of since the controversy erupted.

So, Unity ran a quick scan on our own comments. We’ve found four instances where someone with that IP address also posted comments here – in each case defending the party or its sympathisers.

The comments go as far back as March this year when I revealed that the think-tank Policy Exchange had been forced to apologise to a Muslim group. At the time we experienced a whole bunch of new readers coming here to rubbish my story without any substance to back it up.
continue reading… »

As you can tell, LC’s had a face-lift. To be sure, there are loads of things to be ironed out. But it’s a complicated setup so I really need to work on it live. You may be wondering why it’s so cluttered too.

That’s because I’m thinking a bit ahead. I’ll be focusing a lot more on news stories and linking to other blogs that are running interesting pieces of news.

I’ll also be adding sub-blogs to the site which will focus on specific topics (such as Westminster, activism etc). I needed to create space for that too. The site is expanding and will eventually feature lots more content, but all that needs to be rolled out gradually.

In the meantime, if you have any comments or spot any issues please let me know below or by email.

The political outlook for progressives in Britain is, arguably, bleaker to-day than at any time in recent – or not-so-recent – history. Even in the heyday of Thatcherism the Labour Party offered a clear alternative vision of what society could and should be. The intellectual energy of the left is sapped: the generation of iconoclasts who came to the fore in the ’70s and ’80s appear to be childless.

The only exception is the Internet, which has enabled us all to connect and debate to an extent that was the stuff of dreams a generation ago. Yet nothing similar has happened here. If the political power of the Internet is to be realised in Britain, it will have to come from beyond the existing parties themselves.
continue reading… »

A couple of days ago Tory blogger Iain Dale wrote an article for the Sunday Telegraph which repeated the same meme that left-wing blogs are boring and right-wing blogs is where the impact and numbers are at.

Usually I let it go because it seems to be a psychological condition amongst right-wingers that they have to continually pat themselves on the back in fear of looking inadequate. As the latest amusing example, here’s Daniel Hannan MEP desperately pleading to be let into the club. I don’t even have the heart to give him a primer about blog ‘hits’ versus ‘absolute unique users’. Anyway, Iain Dale said:

Over the last few years, Right-of-centre blogs such as my own (Iain Dale’s Diary), Guido Fawkes, ConservativeHome, Dizzy Thinks, Nadine Dorries MP, Donal Blaney, Devil’s Kitchen and John Redwood’s Diary have come into their own. Several are now read by more than 100,000 individuals every month.
…
Bloggers like me, Tim Montgomerie of ConservativeHome and Guido Fawkes have become part of the media punditry circuit. But on the Left-of-centre, tumbleweed still blows around the blogosphere.

Gotta love the ‘media punditry circuit’ quote. But tumbleweed, really?
continue reading… »

If there’s one lesson for the Labour party to be learned from smeargate – it’s that if Derek Draper is leading your online operations then you may as well give up politics.

The antics of Damian McBride and Derek Draper, the latter now beyond redemption (again), epitomise all that has gone wrong with the Labour Party. That Alastair Campbell, John Prescott and others at cabinet level put their faith in Draper to bolster their online operations has now shown to be stupidity of near epic proportions.

But in case it isn’t already clear to the party why we are angry, it’s because we expect more of the left. We expect more of a party that claims to represent the left. We understand the need for pragmatism, for building narratives, and sometimes the need for discipline. But this episode serves to highlight all that has gone wrong with the Labour party.
continue reading… »

The smugness pours through Iain Dale’s article at the Guardian’s Comment is Free site, as Dale tries to assess how much of a competitor Derek Draper’s Labour List is likely to be to sites such as Conservative Home.

Liberal Conspiracy is too serious, according to Dale, so there is room open on the Left for a big blog, but the smugness threatens to choke off whatever point Dale was making when he says, “It would be good…to have some real competition for a change.”

In the words of my forefathers, what an arrogant little shoite Iain Dale is. What I’d like to know is this: by what standard can Conservative Home or the Spectator Coffee House be judged as more successful than any individual or collective Left effort? More visits? By that definition, the websites of the mainstream meedja have us all beaten – but the very reason we bloggers write in the first place is that we don’t want to read inane drivel. Quality matters – not just popular appeal.
continue reading… »

I recently wrote about the Obama campaign’s ground operations that helped them win the election, and pointed out that many of the online techniques used by the campaign were first pioneered by US left-wing blogs.

Everyone in the UK now keeps talking about aping the Obama campaign but no one has actually done anything about it yet as far as I’ve seen. But this may soon change. So what can we do and what is required?

First, some questions need to be answered.
continue reading… »

There’s an interesting blog post here about online trolling, which basically affirms my theory that if a blog’s debate level is allowed to deteriorate by allowing loads of trolling, then it gets worse.

The ‘broken windows’ theory, online:

Much of the tone of discourse online is governed by the level of moderation and to what extent people are encouraged to “own” their words. When forums, message boards, and blog comment threads with more than a handful of participants are unmoderated, bad behavior follows. The appearance of one troll encourages others. Undeleted hateful or ad hominem comments are an indication that that sort of thing is allowable behavior and encourages more of the same. Those commenters who are normally respectable participants are emboldened by the uptick in bad behavior and misbehave themselves.

This is why we have a tight comments policy, and I stick by my view that drive-by commenters who come here only to say ‘oh you call yourself liberals then‘, or ‘lefties are just stalinist evil scum‘ etc, will have their vowels removed. This is a debate and discussion site aimed at the liberal-left, though it is an open site and I encourage constructive debate, broken windows will not be tolerated for obvious reasons. If you want to hurl insults, use Guido Fawkes – that’s all they do there.