And another thing…

If you’re a libertarian (or a real conservative) the MSM aren’t much interested in representing your views, so the blogosphere it is.

Blogs are (mostly) operated by ordinary people expressing their genuine views, whereas the MSM has certain agendas it has to promote.

E.g. “It’s The Sun Wot Won It“.

To answer another of your points, the power of the media also helps explain why New Labour aren’t polling single figures (or zero).

Tom,

Lots of reason but surel the simplest one is that “the right” is in opposition, and until recently anyway the media in general is very pro nulab. Why read a blog to read again whay youve jusy heard on the BBC etc?

I also think a libertarian outlook – left right or centre – is best suited to the web. The nepo stalist/keep the natives dum approach = particulasrly prevelant in Labour in Scotlad, just doint work, dont play when info is so freely available on the net, and debunking spin so instant

Alastair Campell, professionally good though he his would have nver thived in the era of 2.0 as kink of spin doctor – guido and co would have had him for breakfast. And maybe als a million or so Iraqui would still be alive.

And nats in Scotland? – kings of the web…what freedom is about!

Tom.
Its because the media in the main and the BBC in particular are of the left. Blogging gives an outlet for us on the right.
Blogging is more free than any other communication and we believe in freedom not in a state that tells you how many asprin you can buy.

You will never understand Tom because you have only been in the media and politics you have never had to EARN a living in the real world. thats why you blindly support the speaker as you are unable to think out of your narrow box.I understand why you think as you do but you never try and understand why others dont.

I listen to a lot of talk-type radio, Mr H and certainly the wide range of opinions which you describe are frequently vented over the airwaves. But I agree with you. (No, really.) The blogging environment means you literally read someone else’s opinion straight into your own head. That’s worth getting a piece of…

MAybe you have seen this but An Anerican take on this http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/2009/05/blogosphere-reality-has-liberal-bias.html

Some three year old thoughts (that’s not thoughts of a three year old) on this very topic can be found on “Why right-wingers blog so nicely” (and on another post I’ve now forgotten the title of) from 2006 on my late, and more lamentable than lamented, blog…

gree with Mek above.

the internet liberates those with a view..

Those with a non establishment view have a problem being heard. Apart from Letter Writing to the papers – with no guarantee of being published (and none of published in full) – what can you do?

Just to add one final point. The Government is authoritarian. ALL UK Governments become that. There is NO toleration of opposition. After all, the Government is ” the ruling arm of the British people” or some such rubbish. That means anyone with half a brain who thinks – will blog against them..

I don’t really do this Left, Right or Centre thing. I just read the blogs which interest me and have an individual personality to them.Which is why you are probably the best from the Left.

This is such an interesting topic, I wonder it does not get mentioned more often, and elsewhere.

First, yourself. You are a raging Nulab Toady, but honest, and funny and idealistic. An antinomy that fuels a warp factor of blogging energy. Also, and don’t underestimate this, you are a sci-fi anorak, and possibly also a train anorak. There are a lot of us about, and we need to stick together.

Next, the Guidos and Dales. I have said this before, but Iain Dale is Everyman. He is not clever, in the sense that he is an intellectual; he tends to react like the man in the street. If ever there was such a thing, Iain is it. Of course, he is the gay man in the street, but nobody cares because he is also a bloke. (very few women comment). He is nowhere near as outrageous as his readers. Guido, I don’t know. Personally I don’t know what the fuss is all about. He got lucky with a few stories and to my mind, did not handle them particularly well. His readers are not very coherent to say the least and they feed like gannets on the flimsiest bits of gossip. For me, Guido is like guiltily reading old copies of “Hello” in the dentist’s waiting room.

My blog has had modest success, but to be frank, I don’t have anything to say that is different or controversial (at least to libbies.) The most posts I ever got on one thread was 50 or more and that was when I did a piece on anti-English racism in Scotland.

One of the reasons I blog is because most of the MSM have banned me. Yes! Really they have! I just cannot get past the moderators, which frightens me to death actually, because I am not an “ist” of any kind or a “phobic” of any kind. When one gets banned for simply pointing out, for example, that the Muslim population of Britain has doubled in five years, it gets banned. It’s off the agenda. They simply will not countenance a debate about anything that smacks of the BNP.

Which brings me neatly to the conclusion. I rarely get dissent on my blog, which is very disappointing and probably reflects your main premise,which is that blogging is the natural home of the libertarian.

I have not had one critical comment in months, until the other day, when a BNP voter criticised me for refusing to countenance the BNP and not being of the mind to do so.

And I can live with that.
And I can live with that.

I’m not particularly right wing (or left wing) but I do recall Denis Healey’s assertion that anyone who wasn’t a communist when he was 20 had something wrong with his heart, and if he was still a communist at 30 he had something wrong with his head.
I suspect that the majority of voters are neither left nor right wing but have differing views on different issues. However, the answer is not centre ground politics. We’ve had years of that and look where it’s got us.
First of all voter apathy and now disgust.
I suspect that if there were a box marked “None of the above” on the ballot paper the results would shake the political parties to the core.
Two or three party politics are no longer the answer to our problems. The electorate are by and large better informed and wise to your duplicitous ways.
The idea that the franchise for running GB Plc can be won by the party that bids the lowest (lowest taxes, big giveaways etc) is absurd. Surely the answer is smaller government? I don’t see Labour or Conservative adopting that idea any time soon.
OK, so the blogosphere appears to be dominated by the “right wing”. That’s a fact that isn’t going to change any time soon.
What has to change is the political parties’ response to us.

If you’re “mainstream” Left, Right or Centre in your politics, then the blogscape doesn’t really offer much that isn’t already found in newspapers or TV news. But if you’re a libertarian, the blogscape has become your first port of call.”

Which begs the question: why is there so few blogs for the hard left? Socialist blogs are frustratingly rare.

I think it boils down to honesty.
I have never known either of them to lie or make up something.
They are full of common sence and will criticise any party or person.
Most Labour blogs never do they stick to the party line.
You Tom support the speaker.
How can you, it undermines your common sence and reduces the credibilty of the blog.
You may critisise but you still take the party line and put party befor country. That is why labour blogs are not taken seriously.
They do not face up to the truth or realality.

I’d say it’s down to two things: independence and sense of humour. Very few left-wing blogs attack their own party (or break with the party line) and even less are amusing. There’s only so much self-righteous seriousness a man can take. The right-wing tends to be much more willing to infight which makes them a genuine source of interesting opinions. The best are also humourous.

It’s why your blog is such a good read. It’s whimsically funny at times and you are willing to write what you think. Your blog about single mums for example, or your last post on the polls were nothing like party political broadcasts. You have one of the few left-wing blogs that seems human rather than just part of a bigger machine.

Guido is scabrous, outrageous, irresponsible, scandalous, disgusting and fascinating.

But he is not patrician.

The establishment may hold him in lower regard than an issue of bowel gas in a lift.

But the establishment, through their collective cupidity, deceit and stupidity, have elevated him to a position where he can portray himself as a conduit for the true voice of the people.

And it would be a mistake to assume, that, once the base vulgarity is stripped away, the voices one hears are not truly representative of that.

He is certainly not Cicero.

But he is not Goebbels, either.

@Andrew F

I’d suggest that Socialist blogs are rare for the same reason that Whig blogs are rare.

Just so you know where I’m coming from: I didn’t know until two minutes ago that MSM was mainstream media. I really was thinking of dimethylsulfone. My bad…

Guido and Iain are for the people.

Left wing blogs are for their party, its as simple as that.

If you read many Left blogs, it’s full of frustrated lefties who cannot persuade anyone to follow their cause, so they insist that all their readers toe the Party Line. Why?

Simple. They think that contrary opinions are wrong and people might agree with them. That is a BAD THING so they stop it. By banning contrary opinions.

See Derek Draper….

Then they wonder why no-one visits..

One big part of the equation is that blogs are, by their very nature, open to everyone. And the loudest voices are those who have no voice elsewhere. One of the reasons I like blogs so much (as an ideal; they are the stuff of democracy).

It’s therefore also the case that of those people who have no representation in the media, some of them will inevitably not just be the ones that the media dislike for having an anti-media message (like the blogs that proclaim the era of dead-tree journalism is finished), there will also be those whose viewpoint is so extreme, so unpopular that no-one would or in some cases even could (legally) print it.

As for the issue you take that the UK’s political blogosphere is heavily right wing, I’d dispute that notion a lot. There are a slew of SNP blogs here in Scotland. A lot of Lib-Dem ones too and a veritable ass-load of communist/trotskyist ones as well. Now, you’d probably decry the communist ones as extremists (as I would; I’m centre-left, ta), as indeed they are. But they are the left. And a good many of your colleagues in the House started out in those vile little trot. bookshops, or handing out copies of the Socialist Worker on dingy street corners.
So really, what you’re complaining about is that there are a lot of pro-SNP blogs, a lot of Pro-Lib-Dem blogs, a fair scoop of pro-Communist blogs, and on teh other side an awful lot of pro-Tory blogs and pro-UKIP blogs (and sadly a rise in the number of right-extremist blogs for the BNP and other neo-nazis), but no mass of pro-Labour blogs.
Ask yourself why, and I think you’d have to come (privately) to the opinion that Labour isn’t *really* left-wing any more. It’s not hard left as it was in the 70’s. It’s not moderately left as in the 80’s, it’s not even left-of-centre as it was in teh initial Blair days.
Now it’s moderately centrist, partly-right wing (particularly on the civil liberties front. hell, the Tories want to increase ciil liberties!!!) and as a result, your party base is losing faith, the grassroots are looking distinctly unwatered, the party is haemorrhaging money since no-one, not the Unions, not the philanthropists and now not even the commerce-leaders will donate any more and basically, as a political force in the UK, the Labour party is at grave risk of being the 4th or even 5th party.
Every day under Clegg the Lib-Dems edge a little further left from their traditional home on the fence, the Tories under Cameron are stealing your centrist policies, here in Scotland the SNP are doing an even better job of holding both the center AND the moderate left, not to mention the slightly-right leaning nationalist element too, and all you’ve got is a PM that dithers, an unpopular Speaker more interested in his pension than his honour, and the biggest scandal in recent decades about the House and no real clue about how to fix it and regain public trust.

Basically, you’re screwed.

Still, not too late to join the SNP, hey Tom?
If *your* expenses are in order of course. Some parties still have a future to maintain.

There is a breathtaking arrogance to this post.

Tom, if 100% of the people who care enough to discuss something are totally against it, that’s something you – as people’s representative – should be listening to very carefully. Simply dismissing everyone who disagrees with you as some kind of straw-man “libertarian, far right opponent” is offensive. As someone who was once Labour, I find a party that is pro-war, pro ID cards and pro-Trident is far too right wing, right wing and authoritarian.

The percentage of people who bother to talk about any given issue on the internet, or indeed write to their MP about it is very small. Most people don’t care enough about a single issue to do that. And the internet allows discussion to be far more aggressive than it is off-line. But you can be pretty sure the percentages “pro” and “anti” you see are represented are fairly similar to the percentages down the pub. If there are two strongly held sides, you will see both sides. If there isn’t a strong “pro” side, it’s because there are not many people who are strongly for ID cards.

By ignoring totally justified arguments against (even if they are overly aggressive, as the internet can be) the government is walking into yet another expensive disaster. Do you really think that all those people who are not arguing against ID cards support them strongly enough for their introduction to work?

When those who aren’t really aware, or don’t care yet are faced with being forced to pay £60 for the privilege of handing over their DNA and information to the government, and told they’ll be fined if they don’t tell the government when they move, will they still be ambivalent? I really doubt it. Anyone I know who is aware of the proposals is against it, and those who are ambivalent become virulently anti when told about the costs and fines. The expenses scandal has shown you what happens when a bulk of people who weren’t aware before wake up to the reality. You can’t get ID cards through without waking people up to the reality and being asked for cold, hard cash. Good luck with that – you’ll need it.

Andrew F – I kinda think of myself as a socialist, it’s just that everyone else has moved to the right, including New Labour.

My own theory on the large amount of Right wing blog’s is that people who are right wing are much better at advocating their views than Socialists.

Tom said: “No one believes that comments threads on British political blogs are representative of the wider view of the public (the public’s views of the current expenses scandal being an exception, I admit).”

Well, certainly not the “OMG, IT’S ALL THE FAULT OF ZANU LIEBORE!!! KICK THEM OUT OF OFFICE NOW!!!11!!!” comments.

What a load of tripe!

Branding the rants of the political blogging scene as “right wing” is the ultimate cop out.

The people of this country, en mass, are sick of whole communities repeating cycles of dependency on the taxpayers dime, of business being strangled so that their jobs go to more competitive economies, of ever raising taxes and an ever raising cost of living, of hearing how another 100 trillion as just been given to the NHS and seeing absolutely NO improvement in services, of hearing how their local Christmas festivities have been renamed “winter lights” and every child who dares speak of nativity plays arrested on the spot, of the local burglary conviction rate being 1% yet 250 police officers with £1,000,000 worth of equipment each waiting in the bushes waiting to catch a motorist who goes 1mph over the speed limit, of the local kids who cause £10,000 worth of damage every night yet it’s the person who dares light up in public who has the full weight of the law brought down on them.

What do you and your ilk have to say about all that? Well, that’s obviously the concerns of the minority right wing of course! Start dismissing those concerns immediately. No-one on the hallowed ground of the left wing could think in such a way eh?

Tom, I have never ever been abusive towards you. Disagreed, expressed exasperation, frustration, yes. But never abusive.

For this however, I make an exception. If you, or anyone doesn’t think that the above are the concerns of the ordinary British citizen, then you are a clown. Simple as.

I read Guido because he is readable, funny, irreverent, often right, persistent, honest, productive and on the story… not something you can say about the lobby journalists as they trade compromise for influence with the political class.

I wouldn’t go to him for policy ideas, but as a challenging commentator on the Westminster political scene he is unsurpassed. Basically, he’s great for those that can’t bear the Brown government and loathe Brown himself – and as a life-long Labour supporter, I count myself among them.

Tom, I am sure there is a multitude of reasons why the blogosphere is dominated by the libertarians and the right. Being both, blogging gives me an outlet for my perceived frustration of 12 years of Labour governments. There is also a comfort blanket in many people agreeing with you and vice versa. Also I love a good arguement, and libertarians and the right tend to have greater access to computers and computer skills, often from working in an office.

The bottom line we are just more motivated.

Tom,

I’ll let you into a secret; in Michael Schudson’s “Why Democracies Need an Unlovable Press” he quotes Walter Meers,a veteran Associated Press reporter
saying “There are too many excursions into trivia, too much play for the public opinion polls, too many words about who’s ahead and who’s behind. There’s a reason. That is what people want to know.”

I give the people what they want and what I want them to want. I also work hard. You have to understand how lazy journalists are in comparison. I do tittle tattle, trivia and gossip and jokes for sure. If I make you laugh, if I make you angry, if I tell you something you didn’t know, well, then I have GOTCHA!

I also have been known to sometimes have some cracking good stories.

John at 8.37 pm: “The people of this country, en mass, are sick of whole communities repeating cycles of dependency on the taxpayers dime, of business being strangled so that their jobs go to more competitive economies, of ever raising taxes and an ever raising cost of living, of hearing how another 100 trillion as just been given to the NHS and seeing absolutely NO improvement in services, of hearing how their local Christmas festivities have been renamed “winter lights” and every child who dares speak of nativity plays arrested on the spot, of the local burglary conviction rate being 1% yet 250 police officers with £1,000,000 worth of equipment each waiting in the bushes waiting to catch a motorist who goes 1mph over the speed limit, of the local kids who cause £10,000 worth of damage every night yet it’s the person who dares light up in public who has the full weight of the law brought down on them.

What do you and your ilk have to say about all that?”

I have this to say John (and pardon me if I break one of my own rules here): what a load of sh*te you are talking.

Fair enough comment Tom.

The first widespread internet – i.e. Usenet/Netnews did tend to have a libertarian bent because that is very often an attitude that goes with computer knowledge and a certain sort of nerdiness.

Of course all that changed the day AOL allowed it’s (mostly dumb) users on to the net.

The moment that happened the net swang right.

Since then, at least in the US, a left-wing blogosphere has grown up in opposition to Bush.

I think part the reason the left is less prominent on the net in the UK is that supposedly a “left” party has been in power, and secondly, left politics in the UK has always tended to be more sectarian than “liberal thought” in the US.

If we get a Tory government, I think a real “net-roots” movement will develop here.

Finally, and I am sure I am prejudiced here, I think political progressives *tend to be* (i.e. not universally) better educated and more inclined to developing systematic thought that those on the right.

This leads to left wing bloggers writing essays rather than blog posts.

On the net, you need to know how to sock it to ‘em in a one paragraph sentence…

http://englisheclectic.blogspot.com/2009/05/why-is-british-blogosphere-so-right.html

I don’t think John is talking a load of shute. He may have exaggerated slightly, but that’s all.

In recent years we have *witnessed* and *experienced* (not imagined or dreamed) our freedom diminishing; our young people being betrayed and led astray; standards in public life plummeting; being lied to to make war at the behest of the globalists; the pure treason committed by those relinquishing our sovereignty; the use of political correctness and other divide and rule devices to devalue patriotism and break us as a nation.

If anyone has the right to swear it’s us!

My honest opinion is that there are quite a few people who need rounded up and tried for treason and other crimes against the British people and the world.

Math Campbell-Sturgess
Monday 18 May 2009 at 6:32 pm
Still, not too late to join the SNP, hey Tom? If *your* expenses are in order of course.
***************************************

I don’t know about anyone else but I’m gagging to know what size of telly Tom was going to stiff us for for his London* pied-a-terre before the nasty Fees Office sent him back to Currys to buy a cheap ‘n’ nasty £749.99 one.

* I’m assuming his Second Home is in London given his first home is in his constituency but… who knows.

This is a better class of blog, no doubt about it. The quality of Tom’s posts raises the level of the responses of the Tommentariat, I reckon. That and Tom’s cynically partisan moderation such that hardly any comments agreeing with him on anything much seem to get through. I’ll say nothing about the Guidophiles who play their own game, as they should. A fairer comparison would be with Dale’s regulars. No contest. I mean, they’re Daleks. wouldn’t you agree? All those in favour say ‘aye’, those opposed ‘no’ – the T.Weeds have it, the T.Weeds have it…

Here, I could do that job. There’s bound to be a vacancy soon.

I think he was aiming badly) at the cultural changes that have occurred in the last 15 or so years, some of which are the fault of Labour, some of which were happening anyway, and many of which can be traced back to 9/11.
Your “ilk” do have a bit to answer for, like CCTV (which a recent study has shown has little effect on crime) being everywhere and to hell with data-protection and the rights of the citizenry to walk about their town without being recorded 143 times an hour (average for a small UK city like Cambridge or Aberdeen).
But to be fair to you, most of his post was bog-standard malcontentism. If Labour weren’t in power and the Tory’s were, he’d be whining at them instead.

Still no thoughts on Martin you wish to share, I take it?
How about this: if he were to be removed from his post, do you think he should stay on as a bankbencher (and thus avoid a very difficult by-election), or should he (in this hypothetical situation) ask to be appointed Steward of Northstead?

A ‘bankbencher’!

Brilliant. I gotta rememember that one.

Well in that case Tom, I hope you don’t mind the frequent commentary from this fellow Labour Apparatchik.

Incidentally, did you get your Google Analytics working? Also, I wonder what you think of my latest post on Labour and Leadership, which stemmed from your recent post about negative campaigning? Link.

“This leads to left wing bloggers writing essays rather than blog posts.

On the net, you need to know how to sock it to ‘em in a one paragraph sentence…”

I have no idea the answer to this, but just wonder – slightly pi*sed, having come in from an evening in the pub and probably shouldn’t be posting – whether you web-literate people have done any studies into how many people actually pay any attention at all to policital blogs and web talk, and how many people wouldn’t go anywhere near them?

I only found this blog because I happened to have just moved to Cathcart and wondered who my new MP was. Otherwise, “Guido”, “ZanuLabour” and all the rest is news to me.

So is this all aimed at some tiny political elite who use the blogosphere? Because it’s kind of depressing and doesn’t in any way encourage “engagement” if you’re not a “blogospehre” obsessive Labour or Tory.

Most of us aren’t, as far as I know. But what do I know…I’ve had a few drinks and maybe I’ve just wandered into a place not intended for a random voter who cares but isn’t an obsessive internet partisan.

Tom wrote: no-one believes that comments threads on British political blogs are representative of the wider view of the public (the public’s views of the current expenses scandal being an exception, I admit).

You can only have written such a thing if you believe you have elsewhere a more accurate measure of public opinion.

As an MP, at the epicentre of political life, meeting dozens of important people every day, and getting hundreds of letters and emails, perhaps you feel you have an unique overview, a hilltop eyrie, that allows you to make such a considered judgment.

Or maybe you receive private polling information every day about the way the British people feel about absolutely everything from the EU to the price of biscuits.

If you do, one has to wonder why you bother to post this blog of yours, or allow anyone to comment on it. After all, if you already know how the broader general public thinks, what is the point in hearing any more from them than is necessary? Or, if you already know what people think, why bother to read said comments?

But you do read them. So you must feel that, despite being a member of a very select club of Really Important movers and shakers, and despite getting a constant feed from polls (if you actually do), you need some added extra insights from somewhere.

But from where I sit, it seems to me that you and your fellow MPs live in a delusory bubble, an echo chamber in which anyone only ever hears the sound of their own voices. They have become detached and separate from the British people. They increasingly only represent themselves and their own opinions.

What else is the expenses scandal about than this? MPs have been putting their own interests and preferences above the interests of their constituents and the British people. The MP who votes purely on the basis of the primacy of his own personal opinion is the same MP who fiddles his expenses in his own favour. Such MPs have completely forgotten that they are supposed to be public servants.

That MPs live in such a neverland bubble isn’t entirely their own fault. The media and lobbyists surrounding parliament all conspire to preserve the illusion.

Might I make a suggestion? It is that the commenters here are not in the least bit unrepresentative of the wider British public. They just happen to be slightly more hot under the collar about things than the rest are. Or angry enough to want to tell some MP – any MP (and you are not my MP) – about it. And that if you were to dig deeper, you’d find that most of the British people feel exactly the same as they do, but don’t feel quite angry enough about it to come and write comments here about it. Not yet anyway.

Or, to put it another way, if we were living in the last days of Margaret Thatcher, the comments here would reflect the loathing that was felt for her then (and which loathing I shared). Times have moved on, and the problem is different now, but the loathing is just as intense, but in a different way, and for different reasons…

…such as the smoking ban, which Margaret Thatcher would never have dreamed of instituting.

A post-marxist class analysis answers it easily enough Tom. “Grass rootsy” stuff like the blogosphere, as with pamphleting of old, is most appealing to outsiders in political terms (as in religious terms to in the past, with non-conformists and critics of the church).

The progressive left wing view is now what a class analysis would call culturally hegemonic. It blares at us 24/7 from the media, the political and cultural classes, and so on. This is what the left set out to achive in the 20th century and it is what you have achieved.

This leaves the grass roots left (Sid and Doris Bonkers) with very little to get excited about. While the left like to always consider themselves revolutionary outsiders fighting entrenched privelege and conservatism, etc, this is no longer true. Lefty buzzwords (social justice, social this, social that) echo around the corridors of power. The minor differences between the main political parties are now details of how progressive left they are. You have cultural hegemony.

It’s very difficult for ordinary people to get excited about supporting the entrenched ruling class, even if they like it. You can’t campaign for something you already have. Just as a century ago, socialists were the wild eyed outsiders pamphleting like buggery against an entrenched ruling class, now they are the insiders and freedom lovin’ liberals (and hang ‘em and flog ‘ems too, sadly) are now the wild eyed pamphleteers.

All that a “grass rootsy” blog like Labourlist can do is trot out the same ruling class pablum we can get from everywhere else in the media. Blogging is counterhegemonic- and since the hegemony is now progressivist socilialism, the counterhegemony is opponents of that.

Agree with Paul Halsall. If we were having this debate in the 1980’s, we’d all be asking why the blogosphere is so left wing. The loudest and best known voices outside of government were the rampant lefties. The best thing for a left-wing blogosphere would be 10 years of Conservative government.

We’re just better at complaining than we are about saying constructive things. And you can’t really hold the Tories or Libdems to account since they haven’t got anything to do except talk.

I’m a lifetime leftie (though not New Labour) and I prefer Iain Dale’s blog (and John Snow) because they don’t censor as you do.

@ Tom Harris @ John

“What do you and your ilk have to say about all that?”

‘I have this to say John (and pardon me if I break one of my own rules here): what a load of sh*te you are talking.’

And what do you have to say about this?

“Branding the rants of the political blogging scene as “right wing” is the ultimate cop out.”

You do choose what you reply to carefully. But I have a good idea that if you *did* say something, it would be delivered with a self-satisfied mien…

And apologies in advance for the disgracefully bad language in this blog… ****

@Cath. Random voters are always the scariest kind…