The Wardman Wire

There’s been an interesting conversation going on over at Liberal Conspiracy

This was my contribution, which is my current high level thinking about political blogging and how far it has reached.

The quotes are from the author of the post Mike Killingworth, who was commenting about the website Political Betting.

This stuff is very Marmite - you either love it or hate it.

Life Online and Local Politics

Life online And that means going beyond article and comments in hyperspace - it means building real-world networks in localities committed to re-engagement,to the political education function the Parties long ago abandoned.

Those who wish to harness it to re-invent progressive politics will therefore do well to regard themselves as operating behind enemy lines. For if the “left” - broadly defined as anyone who considers rampant individualism to be insuffiicent for the good life - is to re-shape itself, it will focus not on égalité - which the nation-state can no longer deliver - but on fraternité.

And that means going beyond article and comments in hyperspace - it means building real-world networks in localities committed to re-engagement, to the political education function the Parties long ago abandoned.

The problem that I see there is that political (or other) blogs are not sufficiently local with a sufficiently dense coverage to achieve anything like that. At the moment the best you will get is something like The Stirrer for Birmingham. I think we are one, if not two, orders of magnitude away from being able to build effective networks in Anytown.

I see two signs of hope in this area:

• The experimentations with local blogs and communities by Regional and Community Newspapers (such as in Birmingham where one of the papers has 35 local bloggers, or in ) would be a far better place to start, since they are already genuinely engaged with staff and infrastructure on the ground - political blogging (apart from for a few blogs with Mainstream access) is a niche of politicos arguing with each other consisting of perhaps 100k people in total, including readers.
• And local blogs such as the one in Crewe and Nantwich that covered the By-Election.

Imho *no* Uk Political Blogs can be considered to be genuinely large websites - even in blog terms. Hitwise published a list of the top 20 individual blogs with the most UK traffic yesterday - none of them are political blogs and only one of them was British. I’ll post on that later (*)over at the Wardman Wire.

(*) On Friday

How Many Political Blogs

A blog is probably a necessity to-day for anyone who wants to become an MP, and before long that will be true at local Council level, too.

At present I don’t see that being in place. I’d guess that the number is less than 500 from a total number of MP/MEP/AM/MSP/MIA candidates of more than 5000. The last list of MP blogs I compiled only had about 30 on it.

I’d better mark this section strongly as *my* opinion, and invite corrections!

For what it is worth, my “best guesses” on blogging politicians are:

• All MP/MEP/AM/MSP/MIA etc: perhaps 60-100 active.
• All Councillors perhaps 200-250 active bloggers.

The best interaction and debate imo is in Wales, since it is a small enough place that all bloggers can more or less know each other, from MPs and AMs to local individuals.

Scotland could be similar but Scottish Parliament blogging seems thinner on the ground (not sure why - could be that I am ignorant of what is happening). Scotland needs a Slugger to be a fulcrum.

England struggles with size so poliblogging gets Balkanised, and divided by “class” (!), area (especially Westminster village), profile (e.g., national media writers) and party.

Relatively few bloggers get to interact with (e.g.,) national politicians unless there is a relationship first, or they are prominent in one of the above.

For example, I have seen AMs and the occasional Welsh MP, and the odd Scottish politician reading my blog, but very few English equivalents. I think that is largely down to the scale of English political blogging - too big for most of the bloggers to know each other.

Northern Ireland I don’t really know that well.

As to politicians who use blogging well - I’d point to some of the Welsh AMs and MPs, and maybe John Redwood for his use of his blog when he was doing the policy review and Tom Watson for the stuff after Civil Serf - provided it feeds through. For the LDs, perhaps Lynne Featherstone.

Wrapping Up

• Where do you think we are with online political blogging now?
• Who are your current favourite bloggers for each party?

I think it is time for another census. I have a political blog directory on the stocks for some time; maybe it is time to build it.