British Political Blogging

Anyone who follows political blogging in the UK will be aware of the current… er… disagreement between Tim Ireland and Paul Staines. It’s a disagreement about how blogs should be run. Ireland is arguing for transparency, permanence and good things like that whereas Staines delights in obscurity, astroturfing and deleting comments whenever it suits his purpose.

The interesting (though, perhaps completely unsurprising) thing to come out of this is that the supporters of the two main protagonists are split on party lines. There doesn’t seem to be a single left-leaning blogger who would consider Staines approach to running their blog or a single right-leaning blogger who doesn’t approve of it.

If you were drawing conclusions then you’d have to consider the idea that left wingers are just more decent people than right wingers.

But I wasn’t going to go into details as I don’t think I can add much to the acres of text that has already been written about the topic. I’m writing this because I wanted to draw your attention to this post by the Political Penguin which seems to sum it all up nicely.

I don’t advocate the position of exclusivity, every principle I believe in is against exclusion. However there was a time when there were certain codes, netiquette, terms of engagement, mutual respect. The problem we now face, particularly if we consider the culture of blogging in the UK, in particular political blogging is that with the advent of blogging tools for children (Blogger/Blogspot.com) (that’s not aimed at you Paul) is that any fuckwit with a gob that doesn’t match either their intelligence nor technical nouse is out there trying to make a name for themselves and stroke their own ego.

This poses a particular problem for someone such as myself. Given my background and personal beliefs about the principles of what blogging should be about and indeed this seems to be a common belief among Labour Bloggers that what is online stays online. However the last few months have shown the complete disrespect for which these principles are held by the Tories and they’re strategy is clearly to drag what’s online into the mainstream media environment with the constant drip drip of dodgy biased and downright wrong information about the Labour Party and various staff/politicians.

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