The state of the British blogosphere

Paul Berger, in an article for the Online Journalism Review, asks if British bloggers are lagging behind their American counterparts when in comes to number of readers and influence.

His broad conclusions are 1. yes and 2. no.

Why do British blogs have fewer readers? Well, there are fewer Britons than Americans, and our press is less opinionated. Berger quotes Neil McIntosh from Guardian Unlimited saying:

"In this country we have an enormously diverse media. You can be offended by Richard Littlejohn on the right and George Monbiot on the left. You can find [right wing] Max Hastings and [left wing] Polly Toynbee in the pages of the Guardian. So where is the ground into which blogs can successfully move?"

Ah, but we still have influence says Martin Stabe:

"What matters most is not reader numbers but who these readers are - the political analysts, the party activists, journalists looking for leads and story ideas. They are what marketing people call opinion leaders. So there is an argument that an elite readership is more important than a mass readership."

Education otherwise

The Guardian reports another of those sad cases where a mother is gaoled because her child is playing truant.

This is one is from Wolverhampton, and the most striking thing about the report are the comments by Christine Irvine, the city council's cabinet member for children and young people:

"It is a legal requirement for children to attend school."

This is, of course, nonsense.

As the government-supported ParentsCentre website says:

Parents are allowed to educate their children at home instead of school if they choose to do so. Under UK law it is education that is compulsory, not schooling, though the vast majority of parents do choose to send their children to school.

I am not suggesting that the mother in this case was engaged in an experiment in home education, but it is frightening that the council cabinet member for children and young people is ignorant of the law.

Those with an interest in home education should look at the Education Otherwise website.

Before the Child Support Agency

Tony Hatfield's Retired Ramblings remind us of how the Conservatives promoted the Child Support Agency. The white paper Children Come First (Cmnd. 1264), published in October 1990, noted in point 2 of its summary:

The present system of maintenance is unnecessarily fragmented, uncertain in its results, slow and ineffective. It is based largely on discretion. The system is operated through the High and County Courts, the Magistrates’ Courts and the offices of the Department of Social Security. The cumulative effect is uncertainty and inconsistent decisions about how much maintenance should be paid. In a great many instances, the maintenance awarded is not paid or the payments fall into arrears and take weeks to re-establish. Only 30% of lone mothers and 3% of lone fathers receive regular maintenance for their children. More than 750,000 lone parents depend on income support. Many lone mothers want to go to work but do not feel able to do so.

As Tony says, compared with the CSA the courts worked wonders.

Trivial relations

These relationships sound unlikely but appear to be true:

• Lauren Bacall and the former Israeli prime minister Shimon Peres are first cousins;
• Daily Mirror agony aunt Miriam Stoppard is also the real aunt of former Labour MP Oona King.

Charles Dance, Dickensian villain

A few minutes ago Charles Dance was simultaneously playing Ralph Nickleby on ITV and Mr Tulkinghorn on BBC1. Is this a record?

Britblog roundup on the move

With Tim Worstall busy promoting his book, this week's Britblog roundup can be found on Philobiblon.

Happy birthday to the Pontcysyllte Aqueduct

The Pontcysyllte Aqueduct on the Llangollen Canal is 200 years old today, reports the BBC.

It is one of the wonders of the British canal system, and well worth going to see if you are in the area. It is even more spectacular if you sail across it.

Sit back to enjoy the fun

Today's House Points column from Liberal Democrat News. "You'll get letters," said the editor.

Teasing Tony

A Tory leader has finally worked out how to discomfort Tony Blair at prime minister’s questions. You agree with him.

For eight long years the Conservatives tried to persuade us that, deep down, Blair is a dangerous Bolshevik. Remember those Demon Eyes posters? They did not work for a simple reason. He isn’t.

Michael Gove gave the correct Tory estimation of Tony Blair when he was just a Times commentator. He wrote: “I can't fight my feelings any more: I love Tony ... as a rightwing polemicist, all I can say looking at Mr Blair now is, ‘What's not to like?’”

Which is why last Wednesday Michael Howard told Blair not to waste his time abusing those across the chamber who agree with him on education. He should worry about his own backbenches. They don’t.

The Independent’s Simon Carr has been urging this strategy on the Tory front bench for years. Praise Blair for enacting good Conservative measures and then sit back to enjoy the fun.

If they stick with it, we shall enter a new world. It won’t quite be Israel, where the prime minister is forming his own party. But Tony Blair’s education measures will probably go through with Tory support and in the teeth of much Labour opposition.

Which will leave the Liberal Democrats with some thinking to do. We shall walk through the No lobbies alongside the Labour rebels. Why not? We are not New Labour.

But we are not Old Labour either. And we should not sound like them.

A skilled and confident teaching profession must be central to our education policy. But too often the teachers’ voice, as heard through their unions, is the reverse. It is endlessly negative, opposing every government imitative – good, bad or lunatic. At its worst it is full of teenage nihilism. It’s not fair. I hate you. You’re not my dad.

This negativity has infected Old Labour with fatalism. There are good schools and bad schools, good students and bad students, and you can’t do much about it. Hence their interest in allocating school places by ballot.

We should be different. We need to talk about quality, innovation and choice, whatever the structures we favour to deliver them. In short, we need to sound more Liberal.

Anyone but the English

A letter from today's Guardian:

So the Archbishop of York thinks the English are embarrassed about their identity (Report, November 22). If I was English, I'd want to keep quiet about it.
Chris Henton
Cardiff

I wonder if this letter would have been published if it had referred in these terms to any other nationality but the English?

2005 Blogged again

Yesterday I wrote about Tim Worstall's book and said how useful the index of blogs will be.

It turns out you can find that index on the web. But don't let that stop you buying the book.

2005 Blogged

My complimentary copy of this book, which is edited by Tim Worstall, arrived in the post this morning.

In the Guardian Jane Perrone describes it as "an accessible introduction to the breadth and quality of writing on offer from some British blogs". She goes on to say:

For me, what lets the book down is its typography. I'd thought gimmicky use of a typeface that looks like it was ripped straight off a dot matrix printer circa 1982 had been deemed unfashionable long ago. And it seems a bit pointless to employ a fake html to indicate when the editor is writing for a book targeted at people not acquainted with the lingua franca of blogs.

If you can get beyond these stylistic quibbles, this is a book that provides proof positive that the British blogosphere is full of great writers.

All this is fair comment. Chicken Yoghurt adds:

The variety of bloggers represented is pretty impressive. The temptation for Tim could have been to go with what he knows. As a narrative of the past year it works as well. Structuring the book chronologically means that people will be inclined to read it from beginning to end rather than if the book had been arranged by, say, subject area.

I was impatient too see which of my postings Tim had included. To my surprise it was a short comment on the government's plans to extend the legislation on incitement to religious hatred to protect Satanists. I'm not convinced that is the best thing I have written this year, and I now see that the first sentence does not even make sense.

But there is a lot of good stuff in 2005 Blogged and I recommend it.

There is also a useful index of the blogs quoted, complete with their addresses on the web. I shall work through it and freshen up my blogroll.

Bombing television stations

This morning's Guardian led on the story that:

The attorney general last night threatened newspapers with the Official Secrets Act if they revealed the contents of a document allegedly relating to a dispute between Tony Blair and George Bush over the conduct of military operations in Iraq ...

The attorney general, Lord Goldsmith, last night referred editors to newspaper reports yesterday that described the contents of a memo purporting to be at the centre of charges against two men under the secrets act.

Under the front-page headline "Bush plot to bomb his ally", the Daily Mirror reported that the US president last year planned to attack the Arabic television station al-Jazeera, which has its headquarters in Doha, the capital of Qatar, where US and British bombers were based.

Writing more about this clearly risks a knock from Inspector Knacker at 3 a.m. But it would not be surprising if Bush were planning to bomb al-Jazeera. In April 1999 NATO forces bombed the Serbian state television station in Belgrade, killing several civilian workers.

As the Guardian reported at the time,

Tony Blair, in Washington for Nato's 50th anniversary summit, insisted that bombing television stations was "entirely justified" since they were part of the "apparatus of dictatorship and power of Milosevic".

And guess which minister told "a heated press briefing at the Ministry of Defence":

"This is a war, this is a serious conflict, untold horrors are being done. The propaganda machine is prolonging the war and it's a legitimate target."

That great pacifist Clare Short, that's who.

Lord Drayson: An injection of funds

Last night the BBC's Money Programme offered an investigation of the career of Lord Drayson - millionaire, major Labour donor and, by a remarkable coincidence, government minister.

Tonight the BBC website reports:

Defence Minister Lord Drayson is being investigated by Commons officials over claims he broke an embargo on a watchdog's report on defence projects.

The Tories say a Ministry of Defence briefing to journalists on Tuesday was a "naked attempt" to pre-empt the National Audit Office report.

Commons Speaker Michael Martin said he would be "very angry" if reporters were given information before Parliament.

Sportsblog roundup

The Militant Moderate hosts a selection of the best in British blogging on the subject of sport. It promises to be the second in a fortnightly series. This one includes two of my posts.

Respect members rebel over gay rights

Respect, the bizarre Trot, Tankie 'n' Taliban coalition put together by George Galloway, is already displaying its inherent contradictions. Harry's Place reports:

Grassroots members of George Galloway’s left-wing Respect party have condemned as “unacceptable” the decision of the party leadership to exclude lesbian and gay rights from their manifesto for the general election earlier this year.

Respect MP George Galloway is now being asked to explain why his party dumped gay rights from its manifesto. Allegations abound that Respect’s right-wing Islamist backers demanded the exclusion of gay rights as a condition of their electoral support for the party.

At Respect’s annual conference on Sunday (20 November), delegates rebelled against party leaders who vetoed the inclusion of gay equality in the party’s manifesto for the 2005 general election.

Sporting quote of the day

The jury's decision is in. Today's winner is an anonymous Daily Telegraph journalist for this comment on the ref's decision not to give a penalty for a foul on Lee Bowyer by John Terry:

Kicking Bowyer is still an offence technically, if not morally.

If your horse got a stone in its hoof

Today's House Points column from Liberal Democrat News.

Knives are out

A late entrant in the Conservative leadership stakes emerged at defence questions. He was quoted by Sir Peter Tapsell as saying “it is easy to get into Kabul, but much more difficult to get out”.

He makes more sense than David Cameron, who would say: “entering and leaving Kabul are both hugely important to many of the people whose support we need to return to government, but it would be unwise to make any specific commitments at this stage”.

And David Davis would say: “The seats we need to win lie outside our southern comfort zone. I know how to win them. And you can't get much further outside the comfort zone than Kabul.”

But I prefer the wisdom of the man quoted by Sir Peter. He was, of course, the Duke of Wellington. The Tory grassroots would really like to Bring Back Maggie. But if they can’t have her, I commend the Iron Duke to them as the next best thing.

* * *

Monday also saw the third reading of the Violent Crime Reduction Bill. While schools drew up plans to confiscate pencil sharpeners, Humfrey Malins, the Tory MP for Woking, was woking himself up about knives.

He calculated that 60,000 children carry knives in school. He claimed the Government should be deeply ashamed that the numbers have risen dramatically over the past few years. And he said “carrying a knife in school is a serious matter that should result in prosecution of the child”.

I sense you nodding in agreement, but hold on. I had a penknife on my key ring throughout my school career. You don’t have to go back very far to arrive at a time when every schoolboy expected to carry a penknife. And every Boy Scout had a more serious knife than that.

In fact the young Humfrey Malins was probably just the sort of chap you were pleased to meet if your horse got a stone in its hoof.

If something has gone wrong with society and is manifesting itself in a spate of violent attacks in schools, it has nothing to do with the availability of knives. And it won’t be put right by turning our schools into a cross between a secure hospital and an airport after 9/11.

18 Stone of Dickens

I have just watched Johnny Vegas spontaneously combust on Bleak House. As far as I am concerned, it was an accident waiting to happen.

The erosion of liberty

Those are the four words that sum up the years since 9/11, according to Timothy Garton Ash in this morning's Guardian. He writes:

If he's still alive, Osama bin Laden must be laughing into his beard. For this is exactly what al-Qaida-type terrorists want: that democracies should overreact, reveal their "true" oppressive face, and therefore win more recruits to the suicide bombers' cause. We should not play his game. In the always difficult trade-off between liberty and security, we are erring too much on the side of security. Worse still: we are becoming less safe as a result.

He goes on to describe the British government's reaction to the terrorist threat at home:

At home, we have seen successive tightenings of the anti-terrorism legislation - or, to put it another way, successive erosions of the Human Rights Act, and of other, older individual freedoms secured by common law, such as habeas corpus. This culminated in the proposal that terrorist suspects should be held for 90 days without charge. Legislation to outlaw the "glorification" of terrorism and a misguided attempt to protect Muslims by criminalising an ill-defined "incitement to religious hatred" both threaten free speech. And so we find ourselves in the surreal position of depending on unelected lords, and the Conservatives, for the defence of our liberties.

All this is good stuff, but he seem too surprised that our attachment to liberty has proved so weak. After all, Conservatism was traditionally wary of liberty, putting a higher value on the established social order. They took up the cause of individual liberty as a response to Socialism and because the left abandoned that cause too easily.

For themselves, Socialists - once Marx's influence kicked in - were suspicious of liberty and more interested in economic equality. Latterly New Labour has seen its role as reducing the liberties of the citizens in order to save them from themselves.

The Liberal Democrats have been staunch defenders of the civil liberties of the sort Garton Ash mentions, but in many ways we no longer speak up for liberty either. As Iain Sharpe says about the party's new policy consultation exercise, in a comment on Quaequam blog:

There is lots in this about political freedoms (civil liberties). What I think is missing is our attitude to ordinary bog-standard run-of-the mill freedom.

As I think you (and others) have pointed out we have ended up on the illiberal side of the licensing debate. We are also the most gung-ho of the parties for a smoking ban. These are not isolated incidents, but fairly typical of the Lib Dem stance. If there is a public campaign to ban something for health or safety reasons, the Lib Dems are likely to be at the forefront of the campaign.

Does it matter - these are marginal issues after all? I think it does. The political centre-left often comes across as worthy, earnest and a little bit controlling. The Lib Dems are at least as guilty of this as New Labour.

I think the party should position itself as a party of the libertarian left - committed to improving public services and supporting the poor and marginalised over the wealthy and privileged, but not trying to impose the lifestyle choices of the average Guardian-reader on the whole of society.

Amen to that. As Garton Ash writes:

It wasn't any of the CIA's covert assassinations or dirty tricks that won the cold war. It was the magnetic example of free, prosperous and law-abiding societies. That was worth a thousand nuclear bombs or stealth bombers. No weapon known to man is more powerful than liberty in law.

The next President of the United States?

Mike Smithson at politicalbetting.com is talking up Mark Warner's chances of winning the Democratic nomination in 2008. He recommends backing the outgoing Governor of Virginia at 8/1 for the Democrat nomination and 40/1 to be President.

For more on Warner see the profile in last Sunday's Observer.