Probably part of the reason for the blogging hyperactivity on the right is the current turmoil in the Conservative Party. When a party seeks a new sense of direction after three election defeats there is scope for endless debate, heightened by fleeting moments of fuming anger and joyful euphoria.In a rare moment indeed I fully agree with his analysis, and it's actually in line with something I alluded to yesterday as well as what I wrote in an article last week which will appear in Iain Dale's 2007 Guide to Political Blogging (to be published in September by Harriman House).
Presumably in the late Seventies and and early Eighties, there would have been addictive blogs putting the case for Tony Benn. They would have been countered perhaps by must-read sites from those heading for the SDP. I guess left-of-centre bloggers would have flourished when Labour was overwhelmed by civil war. Now Labour is more settled and will be thrown into blog paradise/crisis only if it loses the next election.
The closing point I made was a wanring about how the Internet has changed the landscape of politics, especially for opposition parties and I asked the question: If the preminence of the Internet that exists today had existed in 1994, would the changes Blair pushed through the Labour Party have happened as smoothly as they did?
The past few days of "Tory infighting" is a brilliant example of how the Internet's influence can impact on the stability of political parties and help drive media agendas. This is especially so when hacks and blogger alike love looking for a "row". Like Jonathan Sheppard, I too was called by Radio 4 about the spiralling Ali Miraj story, and I made the same point to them.
The blogs are great, they encourage debate, engage activists in discussion and generally keep things moving which is healthy. But they also run diamterically to the notion of discipline unless the bloggers - and I mean party political bloggers here - are consciously aware of such considerations.
This is true I think across the political spectrum, and I have no doubt that when Labour are no longer in power (and it will happen) they will find themselves in a similar situation to where the right is now.
4 comments:
I'm more than prepared to wait a very, very long time.
I'm sure you are, although I imagine even you would concede that the Labour is going to lose power eventually. Who to of course remains to be seen, but it would be folly to think it wouldn't happen - unless of course we went down the route of say Venezuela or Cuba where freedom and democracy no longer exist but the health service is just great!
posted at Dale's but I think it's important.
"Changing the course of history" is not a very useful term since you change the course of history every time you walk out the door. If we can define it as influencing trends, organisations, changing society and culture etc, so that different behaviour is observed, over a period of time then there are examples, but they are not linear enough or figurative to pin down.
For far too long "political correctness" has stifled popular thinking. It is an example of how the blogosphere has and will show the absurdity of it.
Bloggers challenge political correctness, not only by their presence, but by their truly representative readership. By representative I mean it is representative of a constituency that is socially anarchic and beyond command and control.
Contrast that constituency with the audience on the BBC's Question Time, which is stacked according to an arbitrary social model, reminiscent of the worst excesses of communism or fascism.
I ask you, who gets nearer to the truth about what people think? - a politically correct QT audience who cheer the liberals an boo the nasty right wingers,
or
people on here who don't give a shit?
Gordon Gekko, a mine of wonderful philosophy, said, "If you want a friend, get a dog." People on TV current affairs programmes want friends, or just approval. They are not going to champion unpopular causes or speak out because they then get the Parick Mercer treatment, for the the slightest deviation from the line.
There are limits. No swearing and no incitement to hatred of individuals or communities, but even here, the PC brigade will use the latter to stifle debate. - I detect, for example, that any criticism of aspects of homosexual behaviour is deemed homophobic by some (not by our host)or that mention of Immigration has caused this poster to be described as a "Tory Moron".
We must resist the trend in society of trying to burn at the stake those whose ideas and attitudes differ from the mainstream, however distasteful they may be.
That way, blogs are and will "change the course of history" for they are the natural progeny of the samizdat.
The reason so many people come to conclusions like Mr Richards' view, is because they have come to regard the MSM - the mainstream media, as the norm; a balanced status quo by which the Blogosphere is judged.
But the MSM is heavily weighted by two factors, both in favour of the Left. Firstly, Britain's - and the world's - biggest news media, the BBC, are wholly Left Wing. Nearly all its output is flavoured by its entrenched Liberal worldview. Many BBC employees have never worked anywhere else since they were recruited from the pages of the Guardian after having graduated. Secondly, the MSM is paralysed by the zeitgeist of fear concerning "offence" which pervades all print and speech media. We live in a Victim Culture and its effects are not always apparent, but reading the pages of Britain's newspapers after a Muslim bombing is salutary. Any criticism of a racial group is littered with clumsy legal safeguards, taking the form of praising certain sections of a group whose members have just blown a bus up, or wandering off-topic to enable throwing in some abstract criticism of certain indigenous Britons - in order to appear "balanced". It's is almost as if MSM journalists have to write in a codified English to get over a message which is then made somewhat ambiguous due to that coding.
The blogosphere is free (for now) of all that clutter. Here you can get your views raw, without the dissembling that political correctness inflicts. So, I would say to Steve Richards and all others who share his views, that the Blogsphere represents the natural order of opinion when you take away the statist financial leg-up and legal/social repression that buoys and favours the Left in the MSM. Without these artificial aids, the Leftwing view sinks to its natural position.
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