Me, this blog, and Dale and Co

I started this blog in 2005 with no great ambitions for it other than to provide an outlet for my political writing which, at that time, was not afforded to me by my 'day job.'

I had left the parliamentary lobby the year before in order to pursue a different line of work and enjoy a better quality of life, and although I did not miss the lobby as such, I did miss being able to sound-off about the political events of the day.

To my surprise, the blog "took off" in a small way and for the first few years of its existence was regularly voted among the top 20 political blogs in the UK in Iain Dale's annual guide.

For a while, I thought it might even fill that much-talked-about left-of-centre "void" in a political blogosphere which, at the time, was dominated by three giant Conservative blogs - Iain Dale's Diary, Guido Fawkes and Conservative Home.

As it turned out, a number of factors militated against that, the biggest of which was that the mainstream media with their hugely superior resources swiftly got in on the blogging phenomenon.

Why bother reading what Paul Linford had to say about the latest Labour leadership crisis when you could read the views of people much closer to the action, such as Benedict Brogan or Paul Waugh?

Like many other 'lone' bloggers at the time, I also found the readers' appetites for constant updates - 'feeding the blog monster' as it became known - impossible to sustain.

And there were internal pressures within my then workplace too, something about which I will say more some day.

I kept the blog going, mainly because it still retained a small core of loyal readers and commenters (thanks, guys), and also to provide an online presence for my weekly column in The Journal, which otherwise only appeared in print.

But I had long since come to the view that the best outlet for my blogging in future would be to join a group blog where the burden of providing a constant stream of entertaining and informative new material could be shared with others.

For a while I contributed to Liberal Conspiracy, but although I am an economic leftist, I have always been a small-c conservative on social issues and it soon became clear to me that my views on such matters as abortion were not appreciated by my fellow group bloggers there.

Fortunately Iain Dale has now offered me another opportunity through his new, non-partisan megablog Dale and Co, and this is where my main political blogging will be done from now on.

My contributions at Dale and Co will be accessible at this page or via this RSS feed

So far I have contributed two pieces on Rupert Murdoch and the phone-hacking scandal - the latest one focusing why yesterday's House of Commons vote to curb his expansion plans was 30 years overdue - and another more reflective historical piece on whether a British Prime Minister will ever again serve two non-consecutive terms.

As for this blog, it will continue, with the strictly limited purposes of providing the following:

An online presence for my Saturday column.

A central reference point for my output across a variety of print and online platforms, including Dale and Co, Total Politics and The Journalism Hub.

An outlet for some occasional personal blogging which will not be of great interest to readers of those other platforms.

A readily accessible archive of my blogging output over the past six years, including my 'Political Top 10s' which continue to get pretty high Google rankings.

A series of links to sites which interest me and which may interest others of a like mind who drop by here.

To those who are interested in that sort of stuff, please continue to visit. To the rest of you, see you over at Dale and Co.

Solidarity

For anyone who might be wondering where I stand on the issue that appears to be dividing the blogosphere at the moment, click here.

What is an uber-Blairite?

Sunder Katwala had a go at attempting to give a serious answer to this burning political question today over at Liberal Conspiracy, but with all due respect to Sunder and LibCon, I'm not at all sure it deserves one.

Uber-Blairism, to my mind, is not so much a serious political philosophy, as belief in a sort of political parallel universe in which Tony Blair still retains the support of the overwhelming majority of the public, Gordon Brown and his cohorts are a group of unpersons quietly fulminating on the backbenches, and the Labour Party, far from being a "moral crusade," is no more than a vehicle for the permanent retention of power at whatever cost.

This is the gist of what I wrote in the comments in the LibCon post:

Uber-Blairism is defined by the following core values:

1. That the Labour Party's position on any given issue should be defined in opposition to whatever views its traditional supporters hold on it.

2. That there should be no ideological constraints on the party drifting as far to the right as necessary in order to outflank the Tories.

3. That Gordon Brown is a useless twat who should never have been allowed to become Prime Minister and should now be got rid of at the earliest possible opportunity.

I could, perhaps, have added a 4th, namely: That the only viable British foreign policy is to disappear up the arse of the White House and stay there (a senior Blairite official actually said this once.) Can anyone think of any more?

Liberal Conspiracy and God

As someone who badly wants to see a really successful liberal-left blog to counter the right's contunued dominance of the political blogosphere, I was delighted to be asked to join the Liberal Conspiracy group blog when it started up last year. But I always feared that as a Christian I would find myself in a distinct minority when it came to issues such as abortion and embryology.

I accept this, much in the way that pro-life Labour MPs have always accepted their party's majority position on such issues, in the interests of building a broader coalition on the kind of society they would like to see.

I do however take the view that when it comes to faith-related matters, people should be careful not to use inflammatory language and to try to respect the other's sincerely-held point of view. Up until now, this has by and large been the case on LC.

However yesterday I was finally moved to protest following an intemperate post by Kate Belgrave entitled Jesus H. Christ Rides Again which referred to Christians as "Jesus freaks" and "Holyrollers" and likened Christ to "a made-up figure like Big Bird and Po."

As you will see from the comments thread, the consensus on the site appears to be that LC bloggers should feel free to make such attacks on the grounds of "free speech," which is, after all, a perfectly respectable liberal point of view. After sleeping on it for a night, I've decided to go along with that and let it lie for now.

But if the general verdict is indeed that freedom of speech is king, I will of course expect the same degree of licence to be shown to anyone who criticises the adherents of any other faith in similar terms. Not that I have any particular intention of doing so.

Jan 31 Update: Mike Ion has now written this excellent piece on LC explaining much more eloquently than I ever could why so-called "progressives" need to be more ready to engage with people of faith.

Ken - a flawed political genius

Much comment on the blogosphere today over Martin Bright's adept character-assassination of London Mayor Ken Livingstone on Channel 4 last night. Iain Dale makes the perfectly reasonable point that if even the Political Editor of the left-leaning New Statesman is joining what appears to be a concerted media campaign against him, it leaves the Labour Party with something of a problem.

For me, the key question is the one posed by Sunny Hundal on Liberal Conspiracy, namely is Ken still the best candidate on offer for the liberal-left, particularly in view of the need to block that frivolous twit Johnson. The consensus on the site appears to be that Brian Paddick is now their best option, but knowing his view on drugs I cannot possibly go along with this.

As it happens, the question is academic for me as I no longer live in London and won't have a vote this time round. But I voted for Ken at the first two Mayoral elections and in view of what he has achieved for the capital, I don't regret having done so.

Ken is a flawed character, to be sure. But without wanting to get all preachy about it, we all are.

Is Gordon Brown a Thatcherite?

Join the debate over at Liberal Conspiracy.

Not a day longer

Natually I will oppose any attempt by the government to extend the period of detention without charge by longer than 28 days - it is far too long already - but I've not blogged specifically on this since Sunny Hundal and my co-conspirators over at Liberal Conspiracy are doing a pretty good job already.

I would just add that on the whole gamut of issues surrounding individual liberty, including of course ID cards, it seems to me that the Tories are currently more in tune with the public mood than the government, a peculiar and rather dangerous position for an avowedly left-of-centre administration to be in.

Greens set to join the real world

With New Labour increasingly seen by many as a lost cause, there has been much discussion on Liberal Conspiracy of late as to whether the Green Party might be a more effective political vehicle for the British left.

This weekend, in what will be seen as an indication of their desire to be taken more seriously as a party, they are set to ditch their dual leadership structure in favour of having a single leader.

The history of the Liberal-SDP Alliance between 1981-87 ought to be enough to persuade party members that this is a good idea.Before the 1983 election, the Alliance appointed SDP leader Roy Jenkins as "Prime Minister Designate" only to realise half way through the campaign that the Liberal leader David Steel was actually more popular with the public.

There then followed a botched attempt to replace Jenkins with Steel as Alliance leader which had the effect only of weakening Jenkins to such an extent he was forced to resign as soon as the election was over.

It got worse. David Owen took over the SDP leadership and refused to give any quarter to Steel whatsoever despite the fact that the Liberals had three times as many MPs. The dual leadership of the "two Davids" ended in total fiasco in the 1987 election campaign with them publicly disagreeing both over whether to replace Polaris and over which of the two main parties to do a deal with in the event of a hung Parliament.

The moral of the story is that, the closer you come to real power, the more important it is that a party speaks with a single, united voice. If the Greens really can get their act together, I for one could see myself voting for them.

More on Gordon and the Vision Thing

Here's what I wrote earlier today over at Liberal Conspiracy.

I've already given my initial reaction to yesterday's Queen's Speech on my own blog, pointing out that while there are some very good things in the package from a progressive or liberal-left point of view, politically the whole thing suffers from the lack of a single "Big Idea" or connecting narrative which would enable Gordon Brown to regain the initiative he lost by not calling an election.

I'm not about to depart from that view. While ideas like giving all parents the right to request flexible working hours are extremely welcome, it is not the kind of thing that is going to stuff the Tories, particularly when they are claiming they thought of it first. By contrast scrapping ID cards, or announcing a Speaker's Conference on proportional representation, or even bringing in fixed-term four-year Parliaments to ensure no repeat of this autumn's non-election debacle, would have done.

However Jonathan Freedland in today's Guardian has a slightly different take on it. While acknowledging that Brown effectively stitched himself up by promising to set out his "vision" when he made his election announcement, he argues that in fact it was the wrong word, and that what Brown can really offer the nation is a programme -"something less than a grand vision but more inspiring than a mere to-do list."

Is he right? Does Brown need a new over-arching vision or narrative to renew Labour in office, or is the country sick of all that kind of stuff after ten years of Blair? I'm not going to attempt to answer this question, but I think it will provide a good talking point!

Why I am joining the Liberal Conspiracy

A few months ago I got an email from Sunny Hundal of Pickled Politics asking me if I would be interested in contributing to a new liberal-left group blog designed to bring some balance to what has become an increasingly right-wing political blogosphere. To which the gist of my response was: too damned right I would.

After much planning and hard work, most of it by Sunny, the new site, Liberal Conspiracy, is now live. Here is a piece I have written to explain why I will be getting involved, which also appears HERE.

A Labour government in its tenth year of office is reduced to nicking ideas off the Tories. The leading contender for the Liberal Democrat leadership is a pro-market “Orange Booker.” And the political blogosphere has degenerated into an increasingly shrill right-wing mutual admiration society.

“What’s Left?” you may well ask yourself. It’s as good a summary as any of the state of British politics – and British blogging – today.

Different people will have different interpretations as to how we got here. From where I’m standing, the responsibility lies very clearly with the last Prime Minister who, though armed with two majorities of 160 plus at a time when the opposition couldn’t run a whelk stall, failed to build that progressive consensus of which he so often spoke.

Damaged irreparably by the Iraq War and its grisly aftermath, he also failed to stand down soon enough to give his successor a similar opportunity to capitalise on the Tories’ weakness, waiting instead until they had revived under a new and charismatic young leader before finally departing the scene earlier this year.

As a result, Gordon Brown now finds himself trapped in a lethal political conundrum by which he dare not set out an agenda that is too distinctively his own for fear ceding the fabled “political centre ground” to David Cameron, even though that centre ground has already shifted several degrees to the right.

The Tory intellectual Michael Gove last week described Brown, woundingly, as a tragic figure, a thwarted idealist now unable to give effect to any of his old ideals, and for whom staying in power as long as possible has become the only remaining political objective.

I am not sure things are quite as bad for him as all that, but the problem was well illustrated by a single headline in the Comment section of The Guardian last week: “Brown's fightback must be built on a real shift to the left.”

Jon Cruddas and Jon Trickett, the joint authors of the article so headlined, did not use those words. Like “Crisis? What Crisis?” they were convenient journalistic shorthand. But they demonstrate how hard it is for those who articulate a liberal-left or “progressive” vision of society to explain that without recourse to labels the public finds unhelpful or alienating.

In a sense, that’s also the challenge facing liberal-left bloggers: how do we make left politics engaging, exciting even? It’s easy to take refuge in the old saw that blogging is essentially oppositional, that it’s better to be a right-wing blogger when Labour is in power - harder to do anything about it.

The truth is the right has had things its own way for far too long. The liberal-left blogosphere, still divided over Iraq and more generally over the whole New Labour project, has been too disparate to mount an effective challenge to the right-wing uber blogs, which by virtue of their size are now effectively part and parcel of the mainstream media

The opportunity has long been there for a group of like-minded bloggers to come together to offer an alternative perspective on current political developments, and to set out an alternative vision for where politics might go in the post-Blair era.

Liberal Conspiracy which is being launched today, is a possibly somewhat belated attempt to fill that vacuum. I am very pleased to have been asked to be a part of it.

Other left-of-centre bloggers and writers taking part in the project include: Aaron Heath, Alan T, Chris Dillow, Daniel Davies, Dave Hill, Dave Osler, Davide Simonetti, David T, Donald Strachan, Garry Smith, Henry Midgley, Jamie K, Jess McCabe, Justin McKeating, Kate Belgrave, Kerron Cross, Natalie Bennett, Padraig Reidy, Robert Sharp, Unity and Sunny Hundal.