And another thing…

SOME might say that, as the author of a blog that did rather well in the last two Total Politics Blog Awards, I have more to lose than others by indulging in a boycott of this year’s contest, as proposed by Though Cowards Flinch.

The boycott is being suggested as a response to Total Politics publisher Iain Dale agreeing to interview Nick Griffin for the latest issue, a decision which resulted in the resignation of Labour MP Denis MacShane from the TP board.

And of course I sympathise. And I admit I raised an eyebrow when Iain announced on his blog that the interview was happening. But I won’t take part in the boycott, for a number of reasons.

The first of those is that Griffin and his odious chums are now democratically-elected representatives of the British people. I wish it were not so, but it is. And ignoring the BNP now isn’t too far from ignoring the views of however many people voted for them. Not a particularly democratic principle, I think you’ll find. And I trust that all those who now want to boycott Total Politics also refuse to watch Question Time…

Secondly, Total Politics is a magazine that political anoraks like us should be encouraging, not boycotting. In this anti-politics age, where celebrity tittle-tattle is considered more important than democracy, shouldn’t we value those very few magazines which seek to portray politics and politicians in a reasonably positive way?

Third, I started this blog to try to rebalance the blogosphere, to add what I hoped would be a popular and articulate Labour voice to the more popular right wing blogs. Large numbers of left-wing, Labour and progressive blogs boycotting the annual poll would effectively mean us retiring from the arena, making the results in the “Labour-supporting” and “Left-wing” categories meaningless. Another victory for the right-wing, then.

Fourth, I worry that the “no platform” argument is used too often as an alternative to addressing the issues which drive voters to abandon the mainstream parties in favour of the BNP in the first place. Yes, the BNP are racists, but that cannot be the end of the debate. And we can’t win the argument with someone to whom we refuse to listen.

Fifth: why is it always the Left which calls for boycotts? Why must that, rather than argument, be our gut reaction? That and banning stuff, obviously.

And lastly, I rather like those Total Politics widgets in the right hand column. They’re dinky.

PERHAPS I should offer some sort of prize, because a major milestone has been reached: today I approved the 30,000th comment to be published on this blog.

That means I have actually read 30,000 of your innermost thoughts – plus many others I deemed too offensive, libellous or stupid even to bother publishing. No bloody wonder I’m going grey…

So thank you, James O’Malley, with your apparently odd obsession with Whitehall cuts (the paper variety) which turns out not to be as weird as I originally thought. Oh, and top name for a blog, also.

A virtual bottle of House of Commons whisky is winging its way to you even as I write (and by “virtual”, I of course mean “non-existent”, but you knew that, didn’t you?).

FILL the gaping hole in your life with these posts from And another thing… in the past seven days – just in case you missed them first time round:

The rise and rise of Tom Harris
Or “My inexorable rise to the top”.

Marr breathes life into a smear
Or “You did not want to say that, Andrew”.

The Conservative Party: An apology
Or “Yes, that’s how I sounded in the 1980s”.

Why you should vote for a Tory
Or “Winning friends and influencing people. Just not people in the Labour Party. Or Ephraim Hardcastle”.

SNP dishonesty is an international embarrassment
Or “They don’t like it up ‘em, the nats, do they?”

Money and mouth now in identical location
Or “Just don’t tell Carolyn, okay?”

Let’s not kid ourselves: The Sun’s decision is a blow
Or “This is how the party would have responded if I’d been 90 points higher up that list of Top Lefties”.

I’LL BE interviewing for a new parliamentary researcher all day tomorrow, so there will be no fresh posts here until Tuesday.

Please try to behave…

I THINK I’ve mentioned elsewhere on this blog that I read every comment submitted. I even have to read the spam, or at least scan it, just in case a contributer’s words of wisdom have been accidentally netted by Akismet.

It’s become an obsession, truth be told, and I’m not at all sure it’s a healthy one. I mean, why should I care so much about what people say about me or the posts I write? But I would be lying if I said I didn’t care, because since starting this blog I have come to care very deeply for it, its content and the nature and content of the comments. There’s a very long comment awaiting approval as I write this in the coffee shop at Asda. It’s a thoughtful comment that isn’t particularly offensive, though some might find it so, since it’s about immigration, so obviously it’s going to offend someone. Not a good enough reason to withold approval, in my book. It’s just that it contains serious accusations against a number of private companies and I can’t publish them, even if they’re true. It’s not my job to defend the potentially defamatory opinions of my readers, particularly if I have to do the defending from the dock at the High Court.

And yet I don’t want to delete it; someone went to a lot of effort to write it and I don’t get the impression that he’s a BNP troll or anything. Just an angry citizen who wants to get something off his chest. Fair enough.

So I will approve it, but only after I’ve gone home and edited it on my computer at home. Not a big edit, nothing that will undermine the point of the comment or anything, just remove the legally ambiguous comments.

In the meantime my Wordpress iPhone application is reprimanding me. I can’t relax because  there’s a red “1″ next to its icon, meaning I’ve approved all but one. Okay, okay, I’ll approve it – just give me some time, damn you! Now I know how the main character in Poe’s Tell-tale Heart felt. Except instead of a dead and mutilated body, there’s a blog with a space where a comment should go…

Come to think of it, wasn’t Tell-tale Heart less about murder and more about a man’s descent into madness…?

THIS kind of thing makes me nervous.

I only became aware of the Wikio ratings recently, when I was told I was number ten on the political list. This month, according to the widget in my left-hand sidebar, I’ve gone up to six.

All well and good, you may say, but I do get nervous. What are the chances I can keep up that level of popularity, both in the Wikio ratings and in the Total Politics hit parade? Another post to be tagged under “blogging will eat itself”, I suspect…

Anyway, here’s the full top ten for September, according to Wikio. A blog’s placing depends on the number and weight of the incoming links from other blogs, not on the number of visitors.

1. Iain Dale
2. Guido Fawkes
3. Liberal Conspiracy
4. Labourlist
5. Liberal Democrat Voice
6. And another thing…
7. Harry’s Place
8. Dizzy Thinks
9. Political Betting
10. Tory Bear

OKAY, this is just an experiment.

I feel strongly that new media — blogs and Twitter especially — should be about more than telling people your opinion. Politicians, if they’re using them properly, should be encouraging two-way debate, even if the criticism that ensues can be a bit near the knuckle on occasion. So this Boocast is a short response to my last post’s thread; I thought it might be interesting to comment on the comments that have been left by regular and new commenters. I don’t know if this will become a regular thing, but if I enjoy doing it (and I do) and if you like hearing it (who knows?) then it might do.

CAROLYN just finished reading through some of the latest comments on this site and asked me: “Is this the latest thing?”

Naturally, I knew immediately what she meant: the latest “line” from anti-Labour commenters. It’s been decided that this weekend it should be “Where’s Gordon?”

Genius, guys, honestly. And subtle too. Really.

OCCASIONALLY I will write a post which will provoke an almost unanimously hostile reaction. Anything on civil liberties, ID cards or state surveillance will do the trick.

Last year, in response to this post, I received more than 200 comments, the overwhelming majority of which were in sharp disagreement with my own viewpoint. At some point in such a thread, a wag will write something lie: “Well, Tom, you’ve received a kicking from the public on this subject so why don’t you admit that you’re wrong?”

Such comments, I assume, are not meant entirely seriously; 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). If the antipathy and downright hatred of the Labour Party among those who comment on this and other blogs were reflected in the electorate, we would have had difficulty reaching double figures in any opinion poll over the last five years (“Just wait and see, the opinion polls are over-stating your support, Labour always leaves the country in a mess and the Tories have to clear it up, etc…” – Johnny Norfolk).

Not that all such comments can therefore be dismissed. Perfectly valid points can and do emerge, even from the screeching and hyper-ventilation of the libertarians who seem to spend most of their waking lives trawling the blogscape for opportunities to vent their ever-present and ever-growing anger.

Which brings me on to the vexed question of why the British blogscape is so dominated by the Right, including Tories but also libertarians. I recently tried to add to the many theories trying to explain this fact, and suggested that timing had something to do with the fact that Guido and Iain Dale are the two most popular political blogs in the country.

But I’m drawn now to the conclusion that, certainly as far as libertarian readers are concerned, the blogscape offers them an outlet and a range of opinions which the mainstream media have never provided. 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.

WRITING in The Guardian’s Comment Is Free column yesterday, comedian David Mitchell says: “If there’s one thing the internet demonstrates it’s that a lot of angry people can read.”

Trying to understand the tendency to abuse in the online comments sections of newspapers (and blogs, I assume), Mitchell, in a brilliantly funny piece, explains how one online critic wrote an incredibly offensive and angry comment about him:

It’s like I’ve said the very thing they have been furiously expecting me to say their whole life. Like they’re a teenager and I’m their maddening sibling who, with just a syllable out of place, can release a torrent of rage because they SO knew I was going to say that because that’s EXACTLY the sort of CRAP that I ALWAYS SAY. To them, I typify a horrendously unfair world that’s all wrong, but will never change because it’s run by the likes of me and Gordon Brown and JK Rowling and Bono and Lulu, sitting at the top table guzzling money pie in hypocrisy sauce and laughing in their apoplectic faces.

(Hat-tip to Nicky for the above, by the way.)

My own comments policy became the subject of domestic debate in the last few days when Carolyn advised me to be more ruthless in deciding whose comments to publish. She remains particularly incensed by a comment from a childless 20-something a few weeks ago who had the gall to criticise how we were bringing up our own children and lecturing us how he would bring his own children up, if he ever got round to having any (and, presumably, if he ever got a real girl to kiss him). 

Carolyn said (and I wrote it down verbatim at the time so I could get this right): “Publishing every single comment is like feeling you have to talk to every nutter who sits beside you on the bus.”

Then she paused for breath and added: “Frankly, some of your commentators are the nutters beside you on the bus!”

I’m glad she got it out of her system. Of course, I don’t publish every comment; there are plenty which contain sweary words, personal abuse of me or others and, occasionally, smears and libel, directed either at me or at others. Carolyn still believes I publish too many negative comments, but I disagree. You have to develop a thick skin if you’re going to stick with this blogging lark. Or this politics lark.

It’s probably worth mentioning that the most angry and abusive commenters here or elsewhere would never dare use their real names. it’s not cowardice, you understand — heaven forfend! — it’s more to do with the the threat of NuLiebore stasi knocking on your door at three in the morning and carting you off tp a concentration camp where you’re forced to recycle copies of the Lisbon Treaty. Or something.