Apathy and the attack culture of politics

Ellie Mae O'Hagan wrote a piece for LabourList recently in which she laments political apathy and tries to analyse what the party conference season says about that subject.

Ellie rightly states that "there are large swathes of the electorate who are disillusioned, angry, alienated from politics, and feeling ripped off and unrepresented". Indeed there are and this has been the case for a long old time. So far so obvious as Ellie herself acknowledges.

As to the main question her piece poses she lightly skips over the Labour conference and immediately draws the conclusion from the Tory conference "that they’re aware of high levels of political disillusionment, but they don’t really care as long as the electorate let them get on with it.".

What a shockingly cynical thing to say. And indeed precisely the sort of thing that commentators, activists and politicians saying about political opponents will cause apathy. After all if members of the "Westminster Village" all say that everyone except their own tribe are scoundrels then what do they expect the rest of us to think? I'd say it's pretty uncontroversial to conclude that a good number of them will think all politicians are scoundrels as a result of these sort of tactics.

It gets worse though: "Finally, Nick Clegg branded the Lib Dems 'the party of education,' a claim so ridiculous I won’t even bother to address it.". How utterly, breathtakingly dismissive of a party that has introduced the pupil premium and ensured that millions of primary school aged children now all have free school meals. I am sure Ellie is obliquely referring to the tuition fees debacle which was handled dreadfully but to so sneeringly dismiss everything the Lib Dems have done in government is to again stoke the apathy problem. What is the point of voting for politicians who are so terrible that their opponents don't even feel they need to explain why you shouldn't?

The coup de grace of the Lib Dem section is this little bon mot: "We all know Lib Dem policies are just tokens they redeem in exchange for power anyway.". Yes we all know that Ellie. The Lib Dems are a bunch of unprincipled shysters who crave power so much that they will literally sell their own granny to get their arse on the seat of a ministerial limo. This is despite the fact that for several generations they got nowhere near power. That of course is ignored because we "all" know the dark heart of the Lib Dems now.

I'm singling Ellie out here probably unfairly because all sides do this. It just particularly jarred with me because of the stated intention of the article.

We have a situation where for short term gain, politicos attack the character and motives of their opponents, their opponents do the same back and this carries on month after month, year after year. At the same time trust in politics and politicians keeps falling, people feel more and more disenfranchised and that politicians are "only out for themselves" etc. I know correlation is not necessarily causation but it doesn't take a genius to work out that in this case one has a high probability of affecting the other.

And in this one article we have a very neat, bundled up synopsis of the problem. A bright, articulate Labour activist attempting to write a piece about what we can do regarding political apathy has managed to load it with attacks that are more likely to exacerbate the very problem she is trying to tackle than to help it.

It's enough to make you weep.

Is anyone apart from Guido making money from blogging?

Some money. Not pictured: My hand

In a somewhat below-the-belt post on The Speccie yesterday Douglas Murray highlighted how Sunny Hundal (who is quitting full time writing for Liberal Conspiracy) was not making a living from blogging.

This has led me to ponder whether any independent blogging sites* are actually making enough money to support full-time people and be self-sustaining. Liberal Conspiracy wasn't. Left Foot Forward, LabourList and ConservativeHome all have full time staff but also have external backers. Lib Dem Voice is run by volunteers, none of whom draw a salary from it.

The more I think about it, the more I think the answer is none. Apart from Order Order the Guido Fawkes site. That does appear to be profitable enough to support full time staff. Although even there they have straddled the mainstream media by publishing a column initially in the Sunday Star and latterly in the Sun on Sunday. Also, it is worth noting that Guido very much goes down the tabloid sensationalist route (albeit punctuated by occasional deep level economic posts to show what Paul Staines is really capable of).

I know that one of the reasons Iain Dale stepped down from such heavy blogging a few years ago was because even at its peak it was not bringing in enough to sustain a living.

I've already highlighted previously how I have never made any money from my online writing despite now having been at it for 5 years and winning awards and acclaim.

So have I got this wrong? Is anyone other than Guido making money from blogging?


*I am not including sites like CiF, Coffee House, or any other magazine or newspaper blogs as they are not independent and I suspect are cross-subsidised from the main papers although I'll be happy for anyone from them to set me straight on this.

Incentives dear boy

Mark Ferguson has posted a call to arms on LabourList this morning urging his comrades to stop neglecting their heartlands and proclaiming that there is no such thing as a safe seat.

His case-study is Bradford West where George Galloway stormed to victory in last year's by-election partly due to the indifference shown to the constituency by the local Labour Party who had been allowed to get away with this because the seat was perceived as solid red.

Mark's argument sounds reasonable but let's consider an analogy.

Imagine that you run a team responsible for administering a number of small local shops, let's say 325 of them across the country. You know that 200 of them have turned a consistent solid profit for the last 50 years. You know that for a further 60 of them they have returned a decent profit for 45 of the last 50 years and are very likely to do so again in the next few years.

That leaves the remaining 65 stores which have historically been more inconsistent. 30 of them have about a 75% chance of returning a profit but the remaining 35 have a 50% chance of going bust without some significant investment and general corporate TLC. Also, there are another 50 stores currently run by a competitor that you would like to get your hands on but that will involve a lot of investment to acquire them and then keep them going.

So as CEO of this company, how do you allocate your resource? It seems pretty obvious to me that the 260 stores that have consistently turned a profit and are very likely to continue to do so should be left largely to their own devices. Sure you might want to send someone round to each of them to say hello, make sure there are no problems looming and tell them how well they're doing but beyond that, spending much more time and money than that would be wasteful and from a corporate perspective rather pointless. Where's the gain? The real focus would be on the 65 stores that are struggling and the attempted takeover of the 50 new stores. That's where the real gains lie in turning around stores that are struggling to make them profitable and adding new stores to the company.

Labour are in a very similar position. They have around 260 seats and most of them are likely to be pretty solid. They may want to put some central resource into some of the more marginal ones but really, to try and win a majority they need to focus on the 100 or so target seats that will get them a working majority. If they were to take their central resource and pour loads of it into seats where they already have big majorities, under our electoral system it would be a waste. The money and time is far better spent where it can likely make the difference between a seat won and lost, not a seat that is won with an even bigger majority than last time.

Mark is wrong when he says there are no safe seats. Yes there are. And Labour has at least 200 of them. Galloway was a "black swan". Yes, he has hit them twice (in 2005 in Bethnal Green and Bow as Mark rightly points out and in 2012 in Bradford West) but it is very unlikely anyone else is going to be able to do that to Labour in 2015. Even if they could it would be 1 or 2 seats maximum and cannot really be planned for. It still makes far more sense to focus on the marginals and maximise their chances of winning there.

Of course this does mean that over time people in the safe seats feel neglected and there is a long term risk that they will get tired of being taken for granted and look elsewhere. This is as true in "true blue" safe Tory seats as it is in safe Labour ones.

It is our electoral system that causes this. The safe seats stack up on either side and the main fight is for the 100 or so marginal seats that are up for grabs. The parties are simply responding to the electoral incentives in the same way as our shop manager is responding to the realities of the market. This cannot be changed by "urging" parties to stop taking people for granted. It will only change if the electoral incentives change to make it worth the while of the parties to focus on every single vote.

Until that happens calls to arms like this are essentially whistling in the political wind.

Here's a crazy idea: Maybe we should let the electorate decide who become PCCs

There has been a lot of noise in the last few days about how terrible it is that Bob Ashford has been barred from standing as a Labour candidate to become a Police and Crime Commissioner in Avon and Somerset due to a crime he was convicted of when he was 13 years old 46 years ago. This is because of a rule that was included in the bill that created the positions whereby a candidate cannot stand if they have ever been convicted of an offence that could have resulted in them being sent to prison (even if they weren't). There are also others who have stood down as a result of this rule include the decorated Falklands war hero Simon Weston due to an offence he was convicted for when he was also a child.

As Mark Pack has pointed out, this is not an "unintended consequence" of the legislation but very much intended as the parliamentary record shows. This very point (candidates being barred due to offences committed when they were children) was specifically debated and there appeared to be broad parliamentary consensus that this was "the right thing to do".

As an aside, I find it intensely depressing that such illiberal laws can be passed through our parliament without any real understanding of how ridiculous the consequences of said laws will actually be in practice from those who are supposed to be legislative experts. I really hope this episode will give the unthinking authoritarians (in all parties) pause for thought the next time they are debating legislation.

Mark Ferguson has done a sterling job on LabourList in recent days highlighting the absurdity of this rule and calling for an urgent change. The Home Office has already indicated that nothing can be done until after the first set of elections in November.

On that LabourList posting linked to above there is an interesting debate in the comments. Some commenters agree the rule is wrong but there are others who point out that it is going to be difficult to define precisely where the bar should be. They suggest that ruling on what would be an acceptable and unacceptable criminal conviction will be tricky. They are essentially saying that there will always be edge cases that seem to fall on the wrong side (either way) wherever the line is drawn.

I agree it would be tricky. But here is a radical idea. The entire point of having these Police and Crime Commissioners was in order to allow voters to choose them. So why not allow the electorate to decide? If they consider a youthful misdemeanor by Mr Ashford should prevent him from becoming a PCC then they won't vote for him. You can certainly bet your bottom dollar that if Mr Ashford's opponents think it will count against him the details of it will be plastered all over leaflets. The same would apply for any of the other candidates who have withdrawn (or may do so in the future).

Perhaps instead though what we will find is that people who have had dealings with the law from the other side as youngsters but have learned their lesson and gone on to be highly productive and trustworthy members of society might just have something very useful to contribute to the role.

Stranger things have happened.

Alex Massie and Alex Smith on House of Comments - Episode 20

The latest "House of Comments" podcast with myself and Stuart Sharpe of the Sharpe's Opinion political blog is now live. The website for the podcasts is here and the Nineteenth episode which we recorded on Tuesday 30th March is available to download via this page here (raw mp3 file here if you prefer). You can subscribe to the podcast via iTunes here. Or you can listen to it right now here:

The format is to invite political bloggers on each week to discuss a few of the stories that are making waves in the blogosphere.

This week we were joined by Alex Massie who writes and blogs for The Spectator and by Alex Smith, editor of LabourList and Islington council candidate.

We discussed the "Ask the Chancellors" debate, the return of Tony Blair, what Labour would do with a fourth term if they unexpectedly won, whether the Tory lack of campaign experience is telling and the experiences of the two Alexes during the US primaries/election campaign in 2008 and whether we have learned the lessons from those in the UK.

Me and Stu are taking a break next week for Easter but will be back the week after (WB 12th April) with a new episode.

If you are a political blogger and would like to participate in the future, please drop me an e-mail here.

Are Tory proposals designed to fatally wound Labour?

Paul Richards has a piece on LabourList today entitled "Tory proposals are designed to fatally wound Labour by 2015". In it he discusses three Tory pledges and links them together to form a theme that he claims will make it much harder for Labour to win any subsequent election.

He starts with the pledge regarding only English MPs being allowed to vote on legislation affecting English seats:

In 2008 Ken Clarke MP, then chair of the Tories’ 'democracy taskforce' published a proposal for restrictions on non-English seat MPs voting on some of the stages of bills which affect England. David Cameron said recently: "for English-only legislation, we would have a sort of English Grand Committee. That is our intention and what is likely to go in the manifesto."

Such a move would endanger the Union, and create a two-tier Westminster Parliament, and so the Tories’ policy should be opposed on principle. But it would also massively favour the Conservative Party, because if it is in a position to enact its plans after the 2010 election, it will have won scores of new seats in England. English votes for English laws in effect means Tory votes for English laws.

If such a move would "endanger the union" then Labour have only got themselves to blame. The West Lothian Question has been widely discussed since 1977 when it was first named as such via Tam Dalyell it so it is not as if they have not had time to work out how to resolve it. The current settlement is not fair. I have my concerns about the Tory proposals on this but at least they are trying to sort the problem out. The effect might be damaging to Labour but they had their chance to ensure the current anomalies were ironed out and chose not to for reasons I suspect of political expediency. They will reap what they have sown.

On Paul's second point I have a little bit more sympathy albeit qualified:

The second announcement is Cameron’s plan to cut the size of the House of Commons by around 60 MPs. Speaking to the Financial Times in January, Cameron said "I think the House of Commons could do the job that it does with 10% fewer MPs without any trouble at all." He said the Tories could legislate in their first term for an urgent boundary review so that all seats had roughly the same number of electors in time for the general election that followed. Cameron will propose this in the general context of anti-Parliamentary feeling in the country. I pity those who might have to oppose the idea – arguing for the status quo against such a seemingly radical policy. Cameron’s spin doctors have since confirmed that this would be a "first-term priority". But where would the axe fall? On Wales, and the English cities, where Labour would have most of its MPs, even after a Conservative win. That means Cameron would fix the system by abolishing Labour seats in the first term to make it easier to win a second term. Analysis by John Curtice at Strathclyde University suggests a smaller Commons would exaggerate swings, and "would improve the Tory chances of winning".

As I have argued before, Cameron's proposals on this are tinkering with a hopelessly broken electoral system. From my perspective it is taking an appalingly bad electoral system which allows parties to get a majority of seats on a minority of the votes and fiddling with it in order to improve the chances for the Conservatives to get a majority of the seats on an even smaller minority of the votes. At the same time deploying any and every argument he can muster to completely refuse to countenance that there might be a fundamental problem with a system which gives the third party 10% of the seats on 22% of the vote and ensures smaller parties fare even worse.

Having said all this, I am sorry to say that again Labour had their chance to reform the electoral system properly (indeed they promised they would in 1997) but Tony Blair kicked it into the long grass claiming it would be "quixotic" to change the electoral system that had just delivered them a huge majority.

Paul's final point is on funding of political parties:

The third announcement appeared in the Telegraph last week, and it concerned Cameron’s desire to reform party funding. Since the cross-party talks on party funding reforms broke down in 2006, Cameron has made it clear that the Tories will legislate to cap all donations to parties (£50,000 is the latest figure). That means any individual or institution can only give up to £50,000. It makes sense if your party is funded by rich people and companies. If your party is funded by trade unions, it sounds a death knell. Cameron’s point-man on the negotiations Andrew Tyrie MP made union funding the sticking point, and the casus belli for the Tories breaking up the talks. The Labour Party is now reliant on the big four trade unions, not just for election posters and leaflets, but to pay the staff wages and utilities bills at head office. If each union could only give £50,000, Labour would cease to exist as a functioning organisation.

I think Paul has a more clear-cut case here. The effect of a change like this would be choke off funding for the Labour Party. I expect over time they would find other sources of funding. I don't pretend to have any easy answers myself here except to say that I think lots of the money thrown around by the parties is wasted on silly, negative advertising campaigns and they could save money by not doing them and/or being smarter about how they spend their money. I do wonder in the end though if it would be politically possible for Cameron to bring in a measure that so disproportionately affected his primary opponents in this way. Surely it would look dreadfully partisan and spiteful, exactly the sort of thing that his party regularly accuses Gordon Brown of?

So in summary I think Paul has a case for his final point but I am much more dubious about his first two. Labour have to accept responsibility for the open goals they have left a putative incoming Conservative government. They behaved for many years as if they would be in power for ever and didn't need to worry about fully following through on their reform rhetoric.

Well it is looking like they may now pay a high price for this calculated inertia.

Fisking Mike Ion on LabourList regarding voting against Labour

Mike Ion posted a rather extraordinary piece on LabourList yesterday entitled: "For many middle class bloggers and journalists, voting against Labour is a luxury they can indulge". It seems that he feels voting for Labour is some sort of duty to the poor and we are being selfish if we are not poor and yet refuse to fall in line. Oh, the sophistry!

I should probably declare an interest before I start. I am a middle class blogger and I intend to indulge the luxury of voting against Labour.

Right, fisk time:

Reading various blogs, websites and newspapers over the summer one cannot help but be struck by the number of so called left-leaning commentators who have been at pains to point out that the likes of David Cameron, George Osborne and Boris Johnson aren’t too bad and that if we do end up with a Tory government in a couple of years time it wouldn’t be such a disaster after all. Too many of the left's 'intelligentsia' appear to place punishing Brown and Labour for their collective ‘failings’ above the reality of the very real improvements to the lives and life chances of whole communities that were abandoned by the Tories in the 1980s and 1990s.

The corrolary of this is that we should all just shut up about Labour's failings (which by putting in quotes Mike implies are not really failings at all) and vote for Labour out of some sort of duty. Failure to do so will precipitate a disaster. Why am I reminded of Michael Hesltine's desperate attempts to get people to vote Tory in 1997 by claiming that we were "sleepwalking into a nightmare"?

For many middle class bloggers and journalists, voting Tory or even Lib Dem is a luxury that they can easily indulge. Why? Because they are the very people who can afford to not have a Labour government in office - but the poor cannot.

Your lot have had 13 years to introduce a fairer electoral system but you decided not to because in good years it favours you with undeserved majorities. How dare you say that voting Lib Dem is a luxury poor people cannot afford because it might "LET IN TEH NASTY TORIES!!11". It is disgusting that Labour members like you are being so anti-democratic as to try to use their own gerrymandered electoral system against the third party in this way.

So what is the answer then Mike? Should we abandon elections and make Mr Brown a permanent resident of No 10? Do you think perhaps that the reason Labour are so far behind in the polls and likely to be ejected from office because, I don't know, many people (including many of the poor) are utterly sick of their posturing, hypocrisy and bullying (amongst many other things)?

Labour has a good record in terms of fighting poverty over the past decade: 600,000 children have been lifted out of poverty since 1997, the poorest fifth of families will be £4,000 a year better off by 2010 and the winter fuel allowance, pensioner credit and increases to the state pension have taken over 2 million pensioners out of poverty.

There is no denying that Labour have done some good in this area but Labour's definition of poverty is debatable and in a lot of cases, families have just been moved slightly to the other side of an invisible line which has been declared "poverty". The winter fuel allowance is not means tested and goes to the wealthy as well as the poor. The state pension is still very, very poor and Brown changed the rules on private pensions as one of his first acts as Chancellor which has made future pensioners who have saved for their retirement worse off.

The 10p tax fiasco was not a deliberate attempt by Labour to penalise the low paid, neither was it a calculated, cavalier act designed to appease middle England. It was, quite simply, a mistake – nothing more and nothing less.

Bzzzt! I call "Bulls**t" on yo ass. It was not a mistake. Brown very carefully designed this to try and wrong-foot the Tories as part of his swan-song budget in 2007 and so that he could claim he was "reducing" income tax from 22p to 20p. He was, it's just that he paid for it by extended the 20p band and abolishing the 10p band, it's just that this bit was temporarily obscured. It was so he could sit down with a flourish and leave Cameron gaping like a guppy fish. It worked for about 10 minutes until we looked behind the figures and saw that he was penalising some of the poorest in society to pay for a tax cut for better off people. There is no way he did not know what he was doing, he knew exactly, he just completely miscalculated and thought he could get away with it. He was wrong but he pig-headedly refused to do anything about it with the arrogance his is famed for until his back-benchers threatened to bring down the entire budget the next year. Even then the "compensation" measures that were brought in did not target the poor, they targeted everybody. He still has not properly resolved this and there are still very poor people who are worse off than they would have been as a result. This disgraceful episode is one of the reasons he is so unpopular.

The ‘talk left but act right’ tendency that is so prevalent in much of Britain’s media appears to have decided that Labour does not deserve another term. They are apparently untroubled by the fact that so many of the changes made since 1997 could end up being rolled back by a Cameron-led, right wing Tory government that could easily dismantle most, if not all, of the things that have been achieved.

It's not the media that have decided that Labour do not deserve another term! It's the public. We are not stupid. We can see through the posturing, politicking and blatant dishonesty. Your government is in its death throes. It is illiberal, hectoring, duplicitous and drowning in spin.

If Labour does fail in winning a fourth term and is therefore unable to introduce further reform of public services then the Tories will find it almost impossible to resist the ideological temptation to demolish the very ethos on which they are built - with more charging, less investment, good services for the well-off middle classes and second-class services for the poor.

They're evil I tells yer. EEEEVILLLL!

Labour used to be the party that gave comfort to the afflicted whilst afflicting the collective conscience of the comfortable. It needs to regain its sense of identity and purpose and above all it needs to remind people that under the Tories it is unlikely that things would get better but they could get a whole lot worse.

A bit of sense at the end here. Labour did used to be that party but they are totally compromised now. They have had over a decade in power and yet the gap between rich and poor has never been wider. How can that possibly be when their raison d'etre is to help the poor?

Labour do themselves no favours by squealing about opposition bogeymen. If they are thrown out of office in 9 months time it will be because we have had enough of them. It will not be down to well meaning misguided middle-class media types.

It will be down to the fact that Labour has failed to make the case for re-election. Full stop.

Is LabourList getting better?

A while ago I pledged to stop reading LabourList. I felt that they were just an arm of the Labour Party central machine as was evidenced by the extremely partisan and uncritical stance taken in almost all of the early posts. This seemed to be its raison d'etre under the stewardship of the partisan attack dog Derek Draper.

However I have noticed that since Draper was deposed (and I went back on my pledge and included them in my RSS feeds again - I thought I'd give them a second chance), some of the posts on LL have started to be less partisan and more constructive. Even, whisper it, critical of the Labour leadership.

This one yesterday from Brian Barder about the ridiculous stance Labour is taking on "Labour investment vs Tory cuts" is an excellent example of what a grassroots blog should be doing. Brian is a longstanding Labour member who has clearly had enough of the nonsense being spouted by Brown on this issue and is trying to get the leadership of his party to engage with what the real debate should be, i.e. where the cuts should fall.

So, whilst I was forthright in my criticism of LabourList in the past, I thought it was only fair to give them to credit for seeming to take on board comments like those I made and actually do something about it!

If they carry on like this, who knows it might even become properly reflective of the grassroots of the Labour party which would doubtless make for very uncomfortable reading for Brown et al.

I wonder what Derek Draper thinks about this...

Derek Draper should go - now

Blimey!

I've been away for the bank holiday weekend down in Devon and so have only just got to a computer. I only had intermittent coverage on my iPhone so have not been able to follow the blogs as closely as I mormally so. I didn't actually need to read the blogs however to see what has happened as it was the main headline on the BBC News yesterday and has been rumbling on today.

There's not much point in me going into detail about McBride's resignation. I don't know much about him but everything I have heard makes him sound like exactly the sort of person that we do not need in politics and I do not lament his passing.

However, when it comes to Derek Draper who was the recipient of the e-mails and co-conspirator in this sleazy episode, I do have some experience. He responded to a comment I left on LabourList when it first started up and either him or one of his cohorts also commented on a post I made a couple of weeks ago when I accused him of damaging the blogosphere.

After this weekend's revelations I now very strongly feel that he is not fit to run a website so closely associated with a major political party.

Draper has posted an entry today on LabourList entitled "Apologies and Regrets". The tone is moderately contrite but I am afraid there is still too much self justification and attempt to spin his way out of things.

I don't like to kick a man when he is down but there seems to be no indication that he is going to step down so here is a quick fisk:

Since the beginning of this year we have worked hard to build a Labour supporting presence online. 99.9% of that time was taken up by setting up LabourList and trying to build it into our version of ConservativeHome. I am proud of what we have achieved in those three months. But of course I regret the 0.1% of my time that I spent thinking about how we might set up a separate left wing “gossipy” site. We had been looking at the success of the right across the blogosphere and seen how effective their more scurrilous elements were. To be honest I think we were a bit dazzled by what they get up to.

But why Derek? Why have you been so dazzled by the sort of bile that the more scurrilous elements of the right in the blogosphere pour out? Surely a blog closely associated with the Labour Party should be arguing the case for the policies on their merits, not trying to smear opponents.

But in the end both myself and Damian McBride came to believe that such a site would be wrong. That is why when you look at LabourList tens of thousands of words have been posted since those emails were sent back in January and the site we had kicked around the idea of - Red Rag - remains completely empty. You can see where my energy and passion has been going.

But Damian did write and send those emails, I did respond hastily and stupidly and now, thanks - it appears - to someone hacking into my private emails, they are in the public domain. Damian has paid a heavy price for writing them but I have to stress one important point: without the hacking they would never ever have seen the light of day. They were destined for the trash can. But we should never really have considered the idea and I am sorry we did. We got ourselves drawn into the most negative part of the blogosphere when we should have been concentrating exclusively on the more positive aspects as a model for LabourList.

Indeed. Also, from what I have read I doubt you were hacked. E-mails are very easy to forward on and unless you completely trust everybody who could have seen them then I suggest your first instinct should be that you have a leaker.

So I am sorry. I am particularly sorry to the individuals mentioned in those juvenile emails, and especially sorry to Nadine Dorries, George and Frances Osborne and David and Samantha Cameron. I can understand why they – and others – may be sceptical but all I can do is absolutely promise that these stories were just daft ideas that never – and would never have - got off the drawing board.

So in those last three months we have had some successes and made some mistakes. The most obvious being this silly idea that the smears and slurs of the right-wing blogosphere could be challenged through setting up an alternative Labour supporting gossip website – whether it contained the infamous stories in Damian´s emails or more harmless tittle tattle.

LabourList has a lot of work to do to grow and support progressives online. I want to draw a line under this email affair and make it absolutely clear that we will be doing that by discussing issues, policies and campaigning. Dozens of people have posted and thousands of comments have been made, the site grows every day, and gets richer and deeper too. That is because LabourList is about ideas and not smears.

As I have posted before, LabourList seems to be used primarily as a way of diseminating Labour Party propaganda and latterly to execute Draper's blogwars which have so spectacularly backfired on him.

On that note, though, while I do think it is right that we hold our opponents accountable our tone has sometimes been wrong. On the specifics of Iain Dale I do think he should have condemned Carol Thatcher when she used the term Golliwog but I have never said he was a racist. From what I know – and hear of him – I don´t believe him to be prejudiced at all, and actually a rather decent guy, just wrong about that particular issue. If I ever suggested other than that I apologise to him too. It may also surprise you to hear me ackowledge that, from what I know and hear, Paul Staines aka Guido Fawkes is also not a racist, though we did, rightly I believe, criticize him for hosting racist comments on his site, alongside other offensive material.

Lots of self justification here.

Maybe this affair will encourage the whole blogosphere, right and left, to commit to a new start, where offensiveness and personal attacks are avoided and debate is elevated not dragged down into the gutter? Maybe this can be a turning point at which we all redouble our efforts to tap into the internet´s positive potential rather than allowing its more peurile aspects to come to the fore? But that won´t happen without many many more people getting involved and taking blogging out of its ghetto.

Maybe it will Derek, but I think that your aims can best be served by you withdrawing from the blogosphere. You came from nowhere late last year and have tried through various tactics to get well known in the blogosphere and to influence things. You have succeeded in that, but it has all blown up in your face and it is you that has dragged things down. In that context this paragraph is sanctimonious tosh. Hand the reins of LL over to someone who understands blogging and can do a proper job.

For those who have suppported LabourList and feel they have been let down, I apologise. I would encourage them – and others - to stay with us: read the site, get involved, make some comments and write some posts. Join the community and make it what you want it to be.

That was always the way to build Labour´s case on line not getting distracted by silly plans for tittle tattle and gossip. I did realize that in time, but should have done so even earlier.. However I really am proud of LabourList and what we are trying to achieve and I rededicate myself to that 100%.

No, it's too late now Derek. You are damaged goods and you need to step back.

For me, the worst aspect of this whole episode is the revelation that one of the intended smears was to suggest that George Osborne's wife was suffering from mental problems. Draper's response to this suggestion was to say that it was "Absolutely, totally brilliant". Derek Draper is a psychotherapist who had a nervous breakdown following the lobbygate scandal in the late 90s.

That he of all people should react to a suggestion regarding a plan to smear an innocent party as being mentally ill in this way tells me all I need to know about him. He hasn't changed and it is now clear to me that he is incapable of changing. He must step down from LabourList.

PS: I know I promised not to post about LabourList any more, but after this weekend I felt I had to! I will now redouble my efforts not to again.

UPDATE (06/05/2009): According to Iain Dale, Mr Draper is indeed now leaving Labourlist for pastures new. Not before time.

I am still not getting it

I promise to try and make this my last post on Labourlist. Alex Smith has complained that there is too much navel gazing going on within blogs and he has a point to an extent.

However, I just do not see the point of posts like this latest one on Labourlist by Glenis Wilmott MEP. It is not informative or interesting, it is just basically a Labour Party press release. That is not what I see blogging as being about. At all.

If Labourlist want to build up a proper readership base they need to stop this sort of pointless activity that seems to be based on the sort of relationship whey had with the media 15 years ago. It is out of date and serves no purpose.

Right, rant over. I am going to take Labourlist off my RSS feed now so I am not tempted to post about them again!

Derek Draper is damaging the blogosphere

I stopped reading Labourlist seriously a few weeks ago once it had become clear to me that it was largely a conduit for Labour party propaganda. If I wanted to read Labour party press releases and centrally coordinated attacks on opponents I would subscribe to them.

In Labourlist's first few days I posted this on one of their initial threads:


Hello.

I wish you luck in this endeavour (I am a Lib Dem activist and blogger) however I do have a couple of concerns.

Firstly the list of contributors seems to largely consist of very mainstream party figures. If a blog like this is to be successful, it cannot always parrot the party line. There has to be space to be able to question and constructively criticise your own party's approach. I hope you can find the right balance here.

Secondly, and I don't wish to get too personal but I am fearful that with such a divisively partisan figure as yourself Derek as the driving force behind it, there is a risk that the blog will reflect this too strongly. I saw you on BBC News 24 a while back and I was shocked at how unwilling to even engage in the discussion with your Tory opponent you were. You just kept shouting things at him like "Same old Tories!" and similar and also kept grossly misrepresenting your opponent's position on things. It was exactly the sort of performance that turns people off from watching political "debates" in my opinion. I hope you can curb these instincts and allow proper debate to occur on here. I know you will have problems with Tory trolls but not all Tories are in league with the devil and they often have valid opinions that merit debate. As do we Lib Dems and others from across the political spectrum. If you can engage in this way, the blog is much more likely to be successful.


To his credit, Draper did respond to my post:


mark. there will be more contributors added and many of those will be non-mainstream. we already have ken livingstone and another key left of centre figure is joining us tomorrow. i don't think that bbc 24 appearance was my best and will try and raise my tone (it'll slip occassionally though, i'm sure) - but the tone of this site should always be welcoming to constructive comments like yours...


However since then I have seen no evidence that he has followed through on the general thrust of what he promised. Every media appearance he has made has been as bad as, or worse than his News 24 appearance I referred to. He has been rude, hectoring and unwilling to listen to anything his opponents say as well as deliberately misrepresenting their positions. Also, there are numerous comments in threads on there that I have seen in a brief scan today that imply that censorship has been taking place on the site against people who post negatively about the Labour Party.

And then today Iain Dale has revealed that a very articulate and thought provoking piece written by Labour Party member Shamik Das criticising Jacqui Smith and submitted to them at about 4:00pm yesterday has at the time of me writing this (about 9:45am the next day) still not been published on Labourlist. Dale has (slightly mischievously) published it himself on his own site now.

Either Draper has deliberately censored the publication of an article that is critical of Jacqui Smith in which case Labourlist is not an independent grass roots site, or if he claims he has not got round to publishing yet due to time constraints then he does not have enough time to devote to this enterprise. Things in the blogosphere move fast and it cannot take many hours or even days to get things published if you want to be fresh and relevant. As Dale has shown, someone else will publish it anyway and you will be caught flat-footed. The old rules of the spin machine no longer work in the digital world and Draper would do well to heed this.

I think Labourlist needs someone else less partisan at the helm if it is ever going to be taken seriously as a force in the blogosphere.

UPDATE1: Labourlist has now published Shamik's article. It was posted at about midday today.

UPDATE2: This is now officially my most popular post ever by quite a long way largely due to Iain Dale having included it in his Daley Dozen yesterday. Thanks Iain! Also, Labourlist is still at it - publishing press releases and trying to pass them off as blog posts as I have detailed here.

UPDATE3: I now feel very strongly that Draper needs to resign as editor of LabourList following the "Sleazegate" revelations.

Fawkes vs Draper - but which one is best?

Only one way to find out...

FIIGHHTT!

On a more serious note, neither of them covered themselves in glory in that discussion. Draper was his usual hectoring aggressive self (and was even inconsistent at least twice contradicting himself). Staines did not do well either. That is the second time I have seen him being interviewed now (the first time being his infamous Newsnight appearance) and he does not come across well as an interviewee.

There was also too much blogocentric talk referring to people and things that only bloggers and Westminster insiders would understand. I doubt many non-blog involved people will be rushing to find out more about political blogging on the strength of this.

I did like it though when Neil shouted at Draper to "Shut up!". It's about time someone did!