Three blogs added to the roll. Guido Fawkes 2.0, Howlingspoons and Pickled Politics. Finally getting back to the blogging stuff after a little break and catching up on things.

For regular readers it’s probably quite obvious I’m a lefty, I’m also a bit of a greeny and a liberal. However for years I’ve been avoiding the obvious clothing accessory that confirms this stereotype – the sandal.

This has changed today as I bought my first ever pair of sandals.

Yes, I’m now a sandal wearing leftie greeny liberal. However there is a very good excuse. I have an ingrowing toe nail that is exceedingly painful and shoes/trainers have become unbearable to wear. I might add this comes at the perfect time of the year just before the main planting of the crops season and the run up to the local elections but I guess I’ll have to live with it until it’s pulled out.

Note to readers, I still don’t eat yoghurt or muesli so I’m not all the way yet.

The wonderful libertarian defender of the free market and critic of wasting taxpayers money, Paul Delaire Staines AKA Guido Fawkes, lived the life of a freeloading student. At least that’s according to this article from Hull University’s newspaper in the mid-eighties, obtained from our sources up North.

While the taxpayer was providing for Mr Delaire Staines to experience scholarly pursuits in true, Young Ones fashion, he forgot to pass his exams. When he was supporting the Contras, poor Paul was obviously not going to lectures. When he was organising for the Federation of Conservative Students, he wasn’t doing his homework. Heaven knows what he was getting up to in 1986 but it wasn’t revision.

I like the bit that the ‘sit-in’ arranged by the Tory students was in a room they’d booked for the purpose. Very radical.

I think the crowning glory of the article has to go to the last quote:

“Only someone with an incredibly high opinion of themselves would take this kind of action and make their own failure the object of such publicity. Mind you, during his one year with us he was always good for a laugh.”

Well, nothing changes does it?

This of course does pose the question for the man who is the first to point out waste and undue uses of taxpayers money. Just how much did this little bit of freeloading cost the tax-payer, and did Paul Delaire Staine AKA Guido Fawkes feel compelled to pay back the money his obviously wasted education cost the hard working families of Thatcher’s Britain? I think we should be told.

OK, scrub the last post about posting being a bit light, I’ve had enough of doing HTML/CSS scripting for one night and there’s a few issues I want to let off about.
The first of these is David Miliband’s blog. I’m not exactly sure what to make of it. I’m not going to go down the line of various critics out there that this site must be costing a fortune to the taxpayer because that’s a bit of a simple attack line that would be more in the childlike interpretation of politics that one would expect from the trash end of the blogosphere.
However my views on it are in some way shaped by it’s particular hosting. Here’s the thing. Corporate blogging is quite common, not necessarily a bad thing, good for companies to keep in touch with customers, especially if they provide a service and equally a more open and honest approach to feedback if the company screws something up.
My webhost is a good example of this, they run a blog to let us customers know when servers have gone down, routers need changing or simply they’ve fucked something up but are trying to fix it. I appreciate that openness and honesty on their part and I’m quite happy to stick with them for this, plus many other reasons.
Blogging in the private sector has taken off, it promotes more honesty, but like most systems it is open to abuse and there’s equally a number of companies that use it to misinform customers, play mind games with competing companies and try to influence things like stock and share prices.
I’ll admit to have not come across any openly sanctioned public sector blogs, perhaps it’s something we should encourage. Personally I’d be very interested in reading the blog of the Walsall Council Chief Executive. It could promote the removal of barriers between faceless bureaucrats in positions that affect people’s lives and those that they serve. Even, just possibly restore a bit of faith in our continually bombarded by the right-wingnut brigade public servants.
So on that basis, a blog appearing on a Government departmental website I wholly support.
However, when that blog is by the Secretary of State for that department things start to get a bit more muddled. He is afterall a politician, and because of that however much he may try to keep the focus on specific areas that are in relation to his department, personal views get through. This steps into the very questionable area then of how such a blog is to be perceived. On the whole it’s quite business-like and deals with the issues relevant to his department, however there are some aspects which are definitely of a personal nature which represent his own views and step (not in the case of outright party political campaigning) away from his brief.
I personally don’t think this is a good thing as it opens up questioning and mud slinging from a host of different people which further damages politics as a whole.
I did however notice that he’s got a new blogroll. This is what spurred me into this article. Haven’t got a problem with a blogroll were David to have his own website which is openly his and may even be of an overtly political nature, but as it is on Defra’s system then this really does overstep the mark for me. It also calls into question about who or what David Miliband is as a person.
Bear with me on this one. You can tell a fair bit about someone by the company they keep. In our online blogocircle thingy there’s a good chance you’re blogroll represents a group of people whom’s particular view you either endorse or at the very least give credence to even if it may be oposing your own. However the presence of a blogroll that includes overtly political links is not appropriate for what is or should be a corporate blog of a particular government department.
It’s also interesting to note the blogs that appear there, I’m thinking Paul (whatever his other name is) Staines AKA Guido Fawkes and Ian (honestly I’m not a liar) Dale. Apart from them being Tories who have tried to bring the blogosphere into disrepute of late with their little antics, they also represent the trash end of blogosphere and quite frankly, if David Miliband does read their little titbits then he has seriously gone down in my estimation.
In all honesty, I don’t think he would read such trash, he openly admits that although he writes the posts, his blog is done by staff at Defra. So the question is, did he request those particular blogs to be included himself, in which case he really should do a bit more research beforehand or were they put there because some bod a Defra who probably equally does not understand the medium or the politics of the situation decided to add them because they’d heard somewhere that they were ‘leading’ UK political blogs.

I decided to step back slightly from this whole debate that is going on in the British blogosphere of late and have a think.
There’s about a dozen blogs that I read on a daily basis. Probably a lot less than many other people on the scene but I simply have many other commitments in life that restricts my time.
Of these they are all either generally Labour supporting or non-aligned blogs.
Why do I read them? Well mainly some shared values and picking up on ideas and the thoughts of others that I hadn’t considered but more importantly a personal desire to absorb informed reasonings and the odd debate.
So here I will admit if I’ve ever visited either Guido AKA Paul whatever his other name is Staines, Iain (the liar) Dale, PratTory AKA Dominic Fisher, or Fox News Lite AKA 18 Tory Street a sum total of a dozen times each then that’s about it. I’ve never watched a party political broadcast for the Tories, sorry news item on 18 Tory Street and I actually have no desire to.
I know there’s a mantra in the blogging world that one should read the blogs of the ‘other side’ but much in the same way that I wouldn’t read the Sun newspaper because it’s poor quality and crap journalism, I don’t read the aforementioned blogs because of their pisspoor quality and content.
PratTory took a swipe at me in the comments section on Tom Watson’s website the other week inferring that the lack of comments on my site somehow elevated his own self-importance in relation to mine and that I was impolite to commentators. Of course if someone were to be impolite to me I would have no problems in giving as good as I get. Of course I could do what the kiddies of the blogosphere do and delete comments from people who disagree with me or set up some convenient anonymous trolls to fight my corner but I don’t. I pointed out that I know how many people visit my site on a daily basis and that I was quite happy. No doubt more people probably visit his site, he seems at pains to put silly little graphs over inflating his significance and with all the accuracy of a LibDem bar chart saying that if his readership grows as it has done he’ll be over the million mark by the end of 2007. Interesting his top referrers reads like a who’s who of the trash end of the blogosphere too, nice company he keeps.
I was very tempted to point out that the Sun outsells all the broadsheets put together and I know how I would personally like my own blog to be perceived but I didn’t. Ironically an almost identical swipe at Unity brought that same response from another commentator.
So just for the record, this is where I’m happy to exist. If it is the desire of some in the blogosphere to stroke their own egos and make up for whatever deficiencies in their life they may have by attracting large numbers of brain dead sycophants to their site then I wish them well with their little worlds and hope it brings them happiness in some small way.

After the likes of Guido and Iain Dale sought to try an infer that the Smith Institute was some kind of Labour front operation they’ve been shown to be a little on the hasty side to try and smear others, or in the typical fashion of the playground bully, they can dish it out but can’t take it.
I don’t have to reinterate the points made by the excellent article by Unity exposing the Policy Exchange thinktank and the amazing coincidence of it’s directors to a said Iain Dale and Nicholas Boles but I thought I’d have another little look around and bugger me if I didn’t come up with this one.
The Henry Jackson Society. Here’s what they say about themselves:

The Henry Jackson Society is a non-profit and non-partisan organisation that seeks to promote the following principles: that liberal democracy should be spread across the world; that as the world