The Wardman Wire

All about political blogging.

This is an idea for a new non-partisan (or cross-party) group blog to cover Welsh Politics.

Most people know that I have been running a blog aggregator (politics-wales.co.uk) for a couple of years, with a combined Welsh Politics news feed at feeds.feedburner.com/politics-wales.

At present the site has a problem in that it has been auto-hacked through a weakness in the version of Wordpress used. I can clear it out, but it will take a full day to rebuild the site in another, clean, account. I can build a brand new blog in less time than that.

I am wondering if now - 1 year before a General Election - is a suitable time to move the politics-wales site over from being a pure aggregator to being a political group blog about Welsh Politics, since I can build one of those just as easily. This seems to me to be a gap in the market in commentary on Welsh Politics.

MySociety, the non-profit organisation lead by Tom Steinberg, has redesigned their TheyWorkforYou.com website with data about UK Parliamentary politics.

The site provides easily accessible records of the UK Parliamentary process, and now contains data going back to 1935.

Political anoraks are going to rub their hands in anticipation, and probably lose the entire weekend to anoractivities (sorry).

> Most men have thinning hair as they get older. For Lord Mandy Mandelbrot, it is his smokescreens that are becoming more transparent.

This week Lord Mandelbrot proclaimed that the reason why he was having to delay Post-Office Privatisation (again) was that there was insufficient Parliamentary time available:

The sale of a 30% stake in the Royal Mail was due to go to parliament before the summer recess but the business secretary said the legislation was being “jostled for space” and will happen “later”.

This is a smokescreen, and Lord Mandelbrot is losing his touch.

There’s an annoying, and in my opinion rather uninformed, post over at the Online Journalism Blog, “Newspapers, turn off your RSS feeds“, where Malcolm Coles argues from Google Reader figures that newspapers should withdraw their reader-level RSS feeds and use them as an information provider for external service providers, switching their readers to Twitter.

I’ll address of few of his points.

David Melding AM, a Conservative Member of the Senedd, has suggested that Britain should implement a more fully federal Constitution, as a way of relieving pressures on the Union. This is from a piece by David Williamson at Wales Online.

THE United Kingdom is in danger of disintegration and should embrace a federal structure of government and create individual parliaments in each nation, Conservative AM David Melding declares in a major book published today.

He envisages a new constitutional settlement which could cut the number of MPs at Westminster to 300 and officially recognise the sovereignty over domestic issues of the parliaments of Wales, England, Scotland and Northern Ireland.

Even ignoring the implication of a savage cut in the numbers of MPs at Westminster, this is fascinating politically for a number of reasons.

James Skinner is a blogger who lives in Monmouthshire, who describes himself as an “Independent Conservative”. Recently he spent a year in the USA on a English Speaking Union scholarship between school and University. Like another blogger I’ll be mentioning tomorrow, he started early.

He blogs at “James R Skinner, Independent Conservative“, under the slogan: “Political commentary that will not be denied the fundamental right to speak the truth.” He describes himself as pro-American.

James got in touch, and I thought it would be interesting to ask for a guest post about his time across the pond.

I am a very lucky political person…why, you may ask? Because I have studied (and experienced) politics in two of the most powerful countries in the world…Great Britain, and the United States.

I first studied for my GCSE’s and A-Levels at Monmouth, but when I was granted an ESU scholarship to study American Constitutional Law in Connecticut (New England), I was there before the academic year had a chance to begin.

As well as studying Law, I was also able to compare the UK and US in political theory, history, economics and philosophy; truthfully, what I learnt across the pond changed my political opinions beyond recognition: Britain needs to be a lot more like America.