The Wardman Wire

Autumnus Horribilis

Regulars will note that I have been somewhat absent recently, and last week even missed doing my allocated Britblog Roundup for the first time ever.

I’ve been in hospital on 3 separate occasions in the last couple of months at short (”Get thee to Casualty. Now!”) notice, and lost something like three weeks in toto, and more time before that. Needless to say, a lot of different things have been cancelled / postponed / not happened.

So – apologies, but with a decent series of excuses.

Mr Eugenides has done a double Britblog Roundup to cover the gap, but let me mention a submission which Bendygirl put in on Twitter to me which did not reach him: Rationing of care and threats to support for disability benefits . Worth a read.

Britblog Roundup #252 Snowbound Edition

As mentioned,Mr Erogenous (in his dreams) has done a bumper Britblog Roundup (The Snowbound Edition).

He particularly covers the saga of the Holyrood Blog McSpat, which is a sort of piccolo Civil War in the Scottish Blogosphere at present between some bloggers and some other bloggers, with some deliberate stirrings, anonymous dodgy manipulators being outed, some arseholes being … well … arseholes, and Alex McSalmond taking an interest at Scottish PMQs (sorry – copied that from Salmond’s notes by mistake) the Scottish Executive Parliamentary Punchup.

As you can see, it then turns into a Holyrood Politico McSpat. Hopefully the mud will all stick to the other mud, and civilisation can move on.

However, unless I’ve missed something, one interesting point is that there is a movement by incomers from politician-land to blog-land wanting to do secret backstabbing using blogs as a tool.

That’s been a pattern for a looooong time, but it won’t do, as there are larger issues at stake here, and the blogosphere is not just an appendage of tactical politics; at least, not all the time. Rather, it can be a forum for building a wider political debate – especially for those of us who are not political insiders and don’t have passports to politician-land, and there are some signs of progress as more people write about a wider range of political questions. So there’s a first rallying cry for next year: help bloggers clean up politics.

And – to avoid me being bombarded with hundreds of frozen haggises from ballistae – I’ll note that that seems to be a point which applies, from past experience, to England and Wales too.

Blog Prognosis for 2010

I’ve mentioned before that I think tectonic plates are shifting in advance of the General Election, as committed partisan bloggers prepare for battle, opposition bloggers prepare to become (maybe) “the establishment’s allies”, and vice-versa.

I’ll be writing about this over the Christmas Break, as well as preparing to reposition the Wardman Wire itself for the Election and Post-Election periods.

Two of the regular contributors to the site here, David Keen and Mark Pack, will be becoming occasional contributors as they move on in their own writing. David, in particular, does eclectic local, cultural and general commentary from his position as a Yeovil Vicar, and is nudging towards the Wikio Top 100 bloggers.

Picking up on the theme mentioned above, the best things I have done this year have been towards broadening political debate, perhaps especially encouraging two legal commentators to focus more specifically on politics.

I think one of the trends which will increase the quality of our political debate in 2010 will be for subject specialists to assert that they themselves are part of the political process, rather than suppliers of material for politicians to accept or reject. It is all about increasing the range of people adding to the debate, and insisting that politics belongs to (cliche alert) the rest of us. Intermediaries and interlocutors, whether media or politicians, will be removed from the communication channels.

One example is the debate around Libel Reform, where significant and authoritative input from legal commentators is one element which has made a big difference in pushing reform forward. To state something patently obvious, bit which a lot of us – including me – forget about far too often, for anyone wanting to make a difference to the political landscape, long-term authority in your core areas is a more important focus than volume of output. It is our specialisms which underpin our identity as commentators.

I’d say the same for another trend this year which has increased participation, towards Ultra Local blogging.

The other side of this coin is that those starting to participate will need to learn political and media skills, and may come face to face with raw debates from which they have been isolated. Some of us will get our fingers burned, but that is just life and politics.