Surely Anton Vowl deserves to be longlisted?

The longlist for the Orwell Prize 2010 for blogging was announced recently. There are a number of political bloggers on the list, all of whom are very good and deserve their place.

However there was one name that I was hoping to see on there that was missing.

Anton Vowl has done brilliant work on his "Enemies of Reason" blog. He consistently skewers press and particularly tabloid hypocrisy with a wonderfully pointed invective style which is both very funny and deadly serious in the subjects he covers.

A post that he did last October is one of the best (if not the best) blog posts I have ever seen. Entitled "Hmm... remember this" it juxtaposed the outraged protestations of the tabloid press at the fact that Nick Griffin was allowed to appear on BBC's Question Time with several of each newspaper's front pages that specifically played on issues that the BNP use to campaign on themselves. The post left me open mouthed at how brazen the tabloid press is on issues like this and rightly received lots of links and tweets at the time it was published.

For me, this is exactly what blogging should be about. You rarely see this sort of thing in the mainstream media because of the unspoken "dog doesn't bite dog" rule that is generally followed in the press.

The Orwell Prize is self-nominating and I know Anton submitted himself from the list on the Entries page. Although it doesn't say I would be very surprised if this post was not one of the 10 that he nominated.

I am disappointed not to see Anton on the longlist. Hopefully however he will get recognition for his great work in other ways this year.