Jonas Morian gör en klok analys av Mona Sahlins påhopp på Fredrik Reinfeldt. Han tycker precis som jag att tonen är oroande. Vidare efterfrågar han att Mona Sahlin ska kommunicera det socialdemokratiska alternativet. Mona Sahlin har verkligen varit aktiv i debatten de senaste dagarna. Jag bedömer att det kommer att gynna Alliansen. Ju mer Mona Sahlin syns och tvingas att försöka förklara vad det är hon vill desto tydligare kommer det framgå att det saknas ett trovärdigt regeringsalternativ på oppositionssidan.
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Apropo politiska bloggning:
The Twenty-First Century Soapbox?
by Bob Piper.
There are as many varieties of blog as there are hobbies or interests.
Everything from cooking to fishing, or computers to photography: you
name it, and someone, somewhere will be blogging about it.
Within these topic areas, there are many different types of blog: a blog
can be a diary, a scrapbook, a journal, or just somewhere for people to
talk about their interests.
Political blogs are no different, and come in a variety of different
forms. Some are straightforward logs of events happening around a
politician, such as that of the former Lewisham councillor Andrew
Brown. Andrew's site covers events and includes links to things
happening in Lewisham and London. When he was on the council, his
blog might have contained reports of the previous day's planning
committee or what was being done to deal with fly-tipping in his ward.
I think blogs like that can be very effective: they give people an insight
into the work of the politician which would otherwise go unseen, and
they inform the democratic process.
Then there are the 'theoretical' blogs that seek to dissect policy or a
political philosophy and explain the nuances of political decision-
making. These can be interesting if you live in that world, but frankly,
they can also be the political blogging equivalent of trainspotting. If
you read them you often wonder whether they were actually written for
an audience, or simply to allow a student to expand upon or develop a
dissertation.
At the other end of the accessibility spectrum are the political gossip blogs, often written by insiders, as exemplified for example by the
Conservative blogger Iain Dale. Dale's site is unashamedly populist, contains snippets of gossip and information fed to him by senior Conservative politicians and fellow journalists. On that level it certainly works and attracts anything up to 200,000 readers a month.
I think my blog falls somewhere between these different styles, though it will include elements of the others. I think of it as using a blog as a soapbox on a virtual Speakers' Corner.
John Major in his surprise successful general election in 1992
famously toured the country and 'got on his soapbox' in market
squares and town centres, and I see my blog as providing me with an
opportunity to get on my soapbox and spout forth. It is an old, pre-
television British political tradition, and in John Major's case it certainly appeared to catch the imagination of the electorate, because he was able to project a 'man of the people' side of himself that had previously seemed hidden to the public.
So, on my blog I may give my views on the European Single Currency;
the Liberal Democrat leadership contest; the state of a local park in my Ward; or the renewal of the Trident nuclear submarine programme. In fact, anything that takes my fancy. I just get up on my virtual soapbox. and let rip.
Commenters on my blog are therefore the equivalent of hecklers at Speakers' Corner. They can come on to the blog and shout 'rubbish' if they want, and I can engage with them, shout them down, poke fun at them or even, have a dialogue and, on occasion, even agree that they are right.
Of course, all of this can be a bit risky for an elected politician. Last year another Sandwell blogger put up a spoof picture of David Cameron 'blacked-up' to look like a Minstrel, and 'talking the talk' to
young people. I thought it was mildly amusing and reproduced the
image. The next thing I knew some Conservative bloggers decided to
create a web-storm about this and complained that the image was racist and offensive (strangely though, they also reproduced it on their sites).
Well, this fake outrage worked, and people seeing the image out of
context started complaining to the local and national media and before
long I was reported to The Standards Board.
Nothing came of it, but it was a lesson learned. No-one expressed
outrage at the image on the original site, but because I was an elected politician I was seen as fair game for those seeking political advantage.
Still, I suppose that is the penalty of this sort of political blogging. If you climb on your soapbox and spout forth, you have to be aware that what you shout out may be used against you by your audience.
NOTE: Bob Piper is a Labour councillor at Sandwell Metropolitan
Borough Council. His blog can be found at:
http://www.bobpiper.co.uk/ .
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