And another thing…

It strikes me that this “command and control” mentality was hard coded into the neural strata of the New Labour projects.

It is an artefact of the time of its creation (mid-90s) and nothing more. Blair and Brown are simply too rooted in that old mindset to be able to seriously contemplate a way of working in which information is largely unmanipulable and flows freely.

This will *only* change once those that are at the top of the Labour Party cut their chops post-New Labour.

And that could be quite some while.

“But the idea that we can be organised under a single strategy imposed from party HQ is laughable and a waste of time, doomed to fail. Such an approach flies in the face of the reality of the blogscape, namely that blogging has always been, and will always be, a grassroots activity, drawing its strength and momentum from a disparate range of individuals, not from organisations or institutions.”

Ah Tom. Tom, Tom, Tom. That’s why you get it and Dolly and Peter and Damian don’t. That’s why we read your blog and engage with you on it and is also why Draperlist gets so comprehensively panned for being centralised anodyne drivel.

I agrre with you Tom. We have more than enough control in our lives since you came to power and i am pleased to see you are speaking for freedom and good sence.

Hm. I wonder if you’d be saying the same thing if Labour and the left were in the ascendant and not looking like a week-old corpse that has been savaged by dingoes.

Surely though if the values mentioned in such a code were seen as suggestions?

Tom,
Danny Rogers of PR Week wrote an excellent piece on Blogging in today’s Guardian

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2009/apr/20/damian-mcbride-labour-emails1

I should be interested to know what you think…..

Tom,

Thanks for the support, sensibly qualified. We tried to acknowledge those concerns, and they are understandable.

Perhaps the difficulty now: we have long had everybody rhetorically saying ‘command and control’ is over, when it clearly hasn’t been. To say this is work in progress would be somewhat generous. Again, nobody is going to say they are defending command and control. It doesn’t work, for one thing, as you say.

But what’s missing? Perhaps nobody (including myself and the signatories here) has really developed a concrete enough agenda to push at changes which would demonstrate significant change (to sceptical audiences, inside and outside the party), so that we find out whether they get taken up or vetoed.

For example, open primaries for candidate selections seem to me one small agenda worth pushing, as both practical and symbolic opening up.

Should we now need to focus on three to five possible concrete changes which would help us get further with the (more difficult?) cultural change. But do we know what these are? Interested to know if there are issues you think should be pushed and prioritised. My impression is that there is a cohort of people coming through in the party who could push further on this.

Successful blogging requires a sense of humour.

And a sense of proportion.

On that basis any official blog – Labour or Conservative – will not work..

Recruiting Draper to run Labourlist says more about the mindset of those who recruited him than anything written by journalists in the past 2 weeks..

But one word that springs to mind is “cretins”..but that is unkind – to cretins…

You’ll have to expalin it to them slowly Tom.

Blogs are created because individuals want to voice their opinions and are (or think they are) erudite amd well informed.

Most blogs fail, either their creators grow bored or develop other interests or they continue but no one or very few read them.

They are personal, if they aren’t personal then they are just marketing tools and most people will see that eventually.

For labour to develop a large number of succesful blogs you probably need to be in opposition, then people will have a target to rail against.

I agree with you Tom.

Johnny said “We have more than enough control in our lives since you came to power”

O/T but I want to tell you what happened to me last night. Maybe you could tell me if you think I’m paranoid or not.

I took the two dogs for a walk around 9pm. It was a nice evening after a pleasant, sunny day.

I turned onto the main road and one of the dogs had a poop in approximately his usual place. Being a responsible citizen, I picked up the small mound in a poop-scoop bag.

Now, on the other side of the road, a pair of lady community wardens (I hadn’t known we had any) wearing hi-viz yellow vests called over and said ‘hello’ and one of them advised me there was a bin about ten yards behind me.

I said I would put it in the next one. She said she was just trying to save me the job of carrying it.

If I’d been walking two elephants, I’d no doubt have appreciated the closer bin, although I’d still have known it was there, having passed it a few seconds previously.

I surmised that she was the paranoid one who imagined that I’d only picked up the offending poop because I saw them coming and so, naturally, being guilty until proven innocent, she thought she better try and guide me to a bin so she could watch me because otherwise I would just throw the bag in somebody’s garden when they weren’t looking.

So now, it’s not even safe to go out on these normally very safe streets without risking being spied on by hi-viz ‘authorities’ and get dictated to.

If I’d forgotten to take some poop bags with me then I could have received an on-the-spot £40 fine. First time offence. No judge, no jury.

Yeah, you’re paranoid.

“So now, it’s not even safe to go out on these normally very safe streets without risking being spied on by hi-viz ‘authorities’ and get dictated to.”

Bastards, eh? How dare they try to be helpful? It’s the onset of a police state, I tell you. Didn’t 1984 begin with Winston Smith being advised by two Thought Police where to deposit his dog’s doo in Chapter 1…?

And if you had let your dog crap all over the pavement and just left it there, you would richly deserve a fine of at least £40.

Thanks for your well-reasoned comments, Tom, but:

1) You really shouldn’t call ladies the B-word, especially those you don’t even know.

2) Did the woman really think that I wouldn’t know where to deposit the thing?

3) Would I still have deserved a fine if I explained I’d forgotten bags and would return home and get some?

4) Does the desire to stroll through my neighbourhood not wanting to be watched by ‘authority’ figures make me paranoid?

And if you had let your dog crap all over the pavement and just left it there, you would richly deserve a fine of at least £40.

As an aside, has anyone given any though to how to stop a dog taking a sh*t? If you had forgotten a bag, I mean?

Obviously reasoned persuasion won’t work with a dog and it seems to me that attempting to physically halt or reverse the defecation would only result in a large, less confined mess on dog, owner and pavement…

I ask this as a responsible dog owner (tho as my last dog would ONLY poo in our back garden and nowhere else – esteem issues, seriously! – I can see the advantage…).

@ Shaun Pilkington

I could ram corks up ‘em, but it would defeat the purpose of walkies and I wouldn’t like to be around when the corks popped.

My dogs do plenty of poo in the garden as well. I suppose it’s only a matter of time before it is considered a crime not to pick it up in case a burglar steps in it.

[...] It is heartening to see a group of Labour bloggers to try and improve standards and to publicise the code of conduct to which they expect to be held. It is certain that many observers on the right will not be shy in requoting aspects of this statement in future clashes with Labour bloggers who have overstepped the mark. There are even those among the Labour parliamentary party who feel that the statement was not required. [...]

“As an aside, has anyone given any though to how to stop a dog taking a sh*t?”
.

Apparently dogs can be trained to ‘go’ to order, (not that mine did) and they will wait – well, at least I never had any accidents in the car on long journeys.

SC – you are paranoid, and you don’t really leave it all over your garden, do you? – you just making an ‘elfnsafety point? ;0)

So, we start by discussing a manifesto for responsible progressive bloggers, and end it by squabbling over the feasibility of ramming corks up dogs’ bottoms…

The blogosphere in action, folks.

@Mr Eugenides

They may not be as unconnected as it first seems; the desire for central control over bloggers output has, in my view, much in common with trying to stuff poo back into a dog!

WRT dogs’ bodily functions, my dear, departed dog passed his personality test (yes, seriously)to become a Pets as Therapy dog. On his first visit to the local hospital he got thoroughly over-excited and started to pee in one of the corridors (he’d just had a cup of tea given by a kind orderly (I wasn’t offered one)). I rushed for paper towels to clean it up and report the need for disinfectant, to be met with complete indifferance and the response that ’someone’ would notice it and mop it!! (Says something about the NHS).

“But the idea that we can be organised under a single strategy imposed from party HQ is laughable and a waste of time, doomed to fail.”

Have you cleared this with the Whips’ Office, Harris?

@ Ani

SC – you are paranoid, and you don’t really leave it all over your garden, do you? – you just making an ‘elfnsafety point? ;0)

I wait until the end of a long sunny day* before setting off on safari, armed only with poly bags and a cheery smile. If there’s been a rainy spell then it does lie for a time and then maybe the authorities could come along and tell me to put it in the bin. And make sure the lid is shut tight. And make sure it’s put out on the right day. And here’s a DNA sample because I’m bound to break the law in the next 30 seconds without realising it.

Of course, now that we’re back in lawn mowing territory, you really want to clear those suckers away regularly. You thought the moment the cork popped was bad?

*Frosty days are quite good too.

Just to point out on Tom’s behalf that he didn’t call the poster a b*stard, but I think he was referring to the ‘authorities’ who she referred to in her story.

You have to feel sorry for Tom, he writes a perfectly intelligent post and gets a load of responses on the problems of dog poo.