Liberal Conspriacy congratulates Neil Clark

The new website Liberal Conspiracy has an odd definition of "liberal-left". It launched the other day without a single well-known Liberal Democrat blogger amongst its announced contributors, yet earlier this evening it published the following in its daily Casting the Net feature:

And finally, some congratulations. To Anti-war, anti-neo-conservative blogger, Neil Clark, for winning Best UK blog award in the 2007 Weblog Awards. Congratulations from Liberal Conspiracy, Neil.

You may not be familiar with the work of "anti-war, anti-conservative" blogger. So here is an example of his work from Comment is Free.

Commenting on the campaign for the government to grant interpreters and other staff who worked for British forces in Iraq, which was supported by many of the best left and liberal blogs (and Liberal England), Neil Clark says:

let's do all we can to keep self-centred mercenaries who betrayed their fellow countrymen and women for financial gain out of Britain.

If that means some of them may lose their lives, then the responsibility lies with those who planned and supported this wicked, deceitful and catastrophic war, and not those of us who tried all we could to stop it.

The paragraph congratulating Clark has now been removed from Liberal Conspiracy with the following off-hand explanation by its author, Aaron Heath:

Ok, congrats removed. Democracy, etc.

Perhaps it is a mistake to make too much of one contribution on a multi-authored blog, though it is interesting that Heath thought himself qualified to offer congratulations on behalf of the site as a whole.

And it is certainly a mistake to pay too much attention to Aaron Heath's opinions. As the entertaining comments following his posting show, he is unaware of the distinction between the words "odious" and "odorous".

But this incident does confirm the impression that Liberal Conspiracy's view of the world has only a limited connection with Liberalism as we understand it in the Liberal Democrats.