Sharpe's Opinion

The Devil’s Kitchen has been considering shutting down recently. Charlotte Gore ‘accidentally looked up the mountain‘ and it gave her writer’s block. Alix Mortimer, in her singularly wonderful way, considered throwing in the towel recently, too:

It is this: that there comes a time when the Sparrow of Opinion, having flown into the Great Hall of Blogging through the Window of Inspiration, must fly out again into the Night of Doing Something Else, as the Venerable Bede nearly said. I have said all that needs to be said, my best tales are all told that can be told here. Oh! better to close the gates on the Republic now before they rust where they stand.

Now, I know that’s only three blogs, and I know plenty of others are still going strong. I know Iain Dale and Guido Fawkes are still churning out 8 posts a day (although both have slowed, and neither are making major scoops). All three of those, however, are in the Top 50 political blogs – and I wouldn’t be surprised if their new-found silence is indicative of a wider trend. A definite calm, I would say, has come across the blogscape.

There’s a few good reasons that this could be happening, of course. Charles Arthur has had a pretty good go at blaming Twitter for the increasing decline of the ‘long tail’ of the blogosphere, and I certainly agree with him there. Comment (if not analysis) has begun to move away from blogs and onto Twitter – and indeed I am guilty of linking to things on Twitter and forgetting to mention them on here. He also quotes some New York Times research which suggests that 95% of blogs are withering on the vine – although I’m not convinced that this is something new. In my experience few new bloggers have the tenacity (or at least the belligerence) to make it past a few weeks of blogging.

I’d like to think that there’s an even better reason, though: I’d like to think that perhaps, just perhaps, everyone’s gone quiet because they’ve won.

Think about it: the driving force behind the success of the blogosphere in the UK has been the desire to break open the Westminster bubble; to force our Government, and our national press, to listen to the people, rather than endlessly circling around themselves. To expose the lies and the scandals at the heart of our political system.

And now we have¹. Victory is ours. The bloggers are being taken seriously, and the Government is on the run. What’s more, even the Opposition are scared of what’s happening. When If David Cameron becomes Prime Minister, he’s going to have a whole bag of hurt waiting for him, and the only response he can give is openness and transparency.

Reading between the lines of ‘Smeargate’ (can we really not have a better name) and the expenses scandal, we see Maximus Decimus Meridias removing his helmet and standing up to Commodus. We saw “a slave become more powerful than the Emperor of Rome”. We saw a few people sat at computers turning the Government into an object of ridicule.

I’d like to think that perhaps, just perhaps, the reason so many people have gone so quiet is that they know they’ve won, that they’re being listened to, and all we have left to do now is wait.

1. The royal ‘we’, of course [↩]

On Wednesday, Apple released a fairly important software update for the iPhone, which added a whole load of features that many people have been waiting for for a long time – principally MMS, voice memo recording, and the ability to use copy, paste and undo functions while writing. Overall it’s a solid evolutionary update which just removes a few more of the barriers to entry which stand between Apple and the wallets of the non-believers, and adds a whole load more little, unremarked-upon niceties which just make the device even more pleasant to use.

Along with this, they added tethering, the ability to connect a computer to the internet via the iPhone.

Tethering is an excellent feature, seen in other phones since time immemorial. Plug your iPhone into your laptop (or even connect to it with bluetooth) and hey presto, internet-to-go.

Perfect, indeed, for the discerning blogger who likes writing in coffee shops.

Bearing that in mind, I was (to say the least) fairly disappointed to learn that tethering isn’t automatically available to people who upgrade their phone to the latest operating system. Far from it, in fact, they have to specially request the ability to tether their phone from O₂. And, indeed, O₂ would like to charge them a minimum of £15 per month for the privilege of actually using the internet connection that comes with their phone price plan.

To put that figure in perspective, my monthly contract, including some amount of talk-time that I never use, is £30 per month. Adding tethering to my contract, for those few occasions when it would come in really useful to me, would increase my monthly spending by 50%.

Now, clearly, O₂ are a private company and are free to charge whatever they like for their services¹. They are also in the privileged position of being the exclusive carrier of the only phone I’m interested in owning, and having me tied down to another 8 months of contract.

Here’s three simple reasons, though, that the amount of money O₂ are asking for to allow tethering is quite simply ludicrous, and the whole situation is an utter, utter disappointment:

I use more data on the iPhone than I would on a computer

Typically, when I am bored and I pull out my iPhone, it’s to read blogs and check Twitter. I avoid writing lengthy blog posts or emails on it because I don’t really like writing without being able to see very much of the text².

The upshot of this is that the amount of data I use when procrastinating with my iPhone is not a lot different to the amount I use on a laptop. On the laptop I’ll sit happily writing and reading, taking up very little bandwidth at all. On the phone I’ll be constantly refreshing, looking for more things to read, using bandwidth constantly.

I’m willing to go out on a limb, in fact, and say that I think I’d use less data in coffee shops if I could use my laptop than I do when I’m only allowed to use my iPhone.

What about when I want to tether a WiFi connection?

Included in the O₂ iPhone price plan is access to the distributed network of Wireless Access Points called ‘The Cloud’. The majority of pubs, coffee shops and shopping centres I go in have The Cloud, and when I’m sat in them I can connect to the internet on my phone wirelessly.

Now, I’ve paid for that Wireless connection through my O₂ bill. Using it doesn’t use any of O₂‘s bandwidth. So why can’t I share it with my laptop? This seems utterly stupid, and utterly inconsistent.

But forget that, because next up is the biggest issue with the whole thing:

There’s no Pay-As-You-Go option

There’s no possibility, in O₂‘s world, for a la carte usage of tethering. Either you pay at least £15, every month, or tethering is blocked. You can’t enable it for a day, or pay for it only as much as you use it. This is a binary decision – on or off. £15; or no tethering.

I’d probably quite happily accept a system whereby if I wanted to use tethering I’d have to pay £2 for the day, and then have it cut off again the day after. Some months I might even end up spending more than £15 on that. The situations where I’d want tethering – in the coffee shop, on the train – are always the exception, not the rule, for me. The way O₂ are playing this, though, they’ll get no money out of me whatsoever. A Pay-As-You-Go option would have me reaching for my credit card this weekend.

This would be an all-round winner, and I’m gobsmacked that it isn’t an option. What are O₂ playing at, exactly.

I don’t usually get irritated about these things. When people complain about the huge upgrade prices on their phones I’m the first to point out that they signed their contract, they committed to a minimum term, they can face the consequences of it. The tethering situation, though, is really irritating me, because it just feels like I’m being needlessly prevented from using a really great feature that I’m willing to pay a reasonable price to use, seemingly for no reason other than the stubbornness of O₂.

Did I mention that I find that incredibly irritating?

1. Of course, the fact that the price plan is described as including ‘unlimited data’, and their principle objection to tethering is increased data usage, sticks in the throat somewhat… [↩]
2. As a side note, I actually rather like the iPhone’s keyboard, which receives criticism from Blackberry fans. I particularly like its excellent auto-correction, which is spookily accurate 95% of the time [↩]

A Blogger, By Any Other Name…

I gave up on anonymity quite a while back (before I even started this blog) reasoning that at least if everyone knows my name I don’t have to worry about the possibility of people finding it out. It removes a little novelty, but it also diffuses any interest people might have in my identity.

One thing that’s always fascinated me, though, is the correlation between identity and readership in blogging. Looking through the Wikio top 20 political blogs, I can only see three¹ whose chief author/editor’s name I do not know.

There are plenty of successful pseudonymous bloggers, of course – but it doesn’t take much digging to find the real names of the bloggers behind Guido Fawkes, or Dizzy Thinks, or most of the other highly successful names in blogging. Rumour has it that even Devil’s Kitchen has an alter-ego with a rather more common name, though I of course wouldn’t dream of mentioning it for fear of the Satanic wrath such an action might engender.

It seems the only bloggers able to attain any great level of success without their names becoming a matter of public record are the ones who work inside our public services, who feel they must remain anonymous out of respect for the people mentioned in the anecdotes, which often cast a rather negative light on British public services. Out of fear that their words would be used against his constabulary. Out of, I’m sure, fear that writing hard-hitting and controversial critiques of their employer under their own name would see them at home nursing a shiny new P45 before you could say ‘free speech’.

The Outing of NightJack

The Orwell Prize winning police blogger NightJack fell into that rare mould, and now The Times, claiming to be doing a ‘public service’², have identified him, and his constabulary.

At this point, though, the only decent thing for you to to do is to go and read the proclamation of the People’s Republic on the matter, for clearly Alix Mortimer’s powers of articulation do far exceed my own³. Particularly this bit:

And now a newspaper has ruined the career of one of them. Because they want a good headline, and probably because they’re jealous of his audience reach and of the unstoppable advance of new media in general. They have ruined. His. Career. And this is not a man highly placed in public service, mark you. Not a man caught out in any wrongdoing. Just a man who wrote down what he thought.

Clearly, shame on The Times for forcing this man to identify himself and the people he has written about. Double shame on The Times, of course, when their actions are put in contrast with a piece on NightJack from The Independent nearly a month ago, which said:

Jack Night’s identity is known to The Independent but we have agreed not to reveal anything apart from the fact that he is a detective constable, aged in his mid-40s. His force area and his real name remain a secret.

I know it’s not just me who thinks this is horribly sad. It also sets a very ugly precedent – I don’t imagine Dr Crippen or Winston Smith slept quite so soundly as usual last night, nor any other public service blogger. I note with great sadness that Sierra Charlie’s blog has disappeared too, although I don’t know for certain when that happened (last post I read was on the 9th of June). If it’s connected to the naming of NightJack then triple shame on The Times.

The message The Times are sending appears to be quite clear: if you blog anonymously, and talk about real life, you’d better not be successful – because if you are, we’ll ruin your life. And just to make that point abundantly clear, the NightJack himself wrote a piece in today’s Times⁴:

My blog is gone now, deleted, slowly melting away post by post as it drops off the edge of the Google cache. The Police Dependants’ Trust is a few thousand pounds better off which may be the only good thing to have come out of this. My family life has changed in ways that they did not want and that is down to me. I deeply and bitterly regret the damage that will be done to the reputation of Lancashire Constabulary, that is also down to me. Next to that, my own career prospects are trivial.

In Defence of The Times

I can’t deny that this whole thing had me fizzing with anger. How dare they, I thought. How very dare they. What has NightJack ever done to them?

Unfortunately, though, that’s just about where the criticism of The Times ends. With shame, and bitter words, and accusations of their utter hypocrisy in refusing to name their ‘sources’ but delighting in exposing a blogger. Far from the creeping totalitarianism that Alix Mortimer alludes to, the actions of The Times are the actions of a free agent, exercising its right to free speech – even if that free speech means revealing the identity of a man we’d rather not know. Whether motivated by jealousy, or mean-spiritedness, or simply the belief that it will sell more newspapers, The Times are absolutely entitled to investigate and identify whomever they wish.

The idea of revealing the identities of those who would rather not be identified is hardly one that’s alien to bloggers, either. It was a blogger who revealed the identity of the killers of Baby P, running the risk of prejudicing a further case against one of them. It was a blogger who revealed the men in Number 10 who were spreading rumours and falsehoods about the opposition to the press. It was a blogger who went against a D-Notice and revealed that Prince Harry was fighting in Afghanistan, forcing him to return when what he wanted to do was fight for his country. That many bloggers “would be horrified to think that the law would do nothing to protect their anonymity if someone carried out the necessary detective work and sought to unmask them” is absolutely true, but those same bloggers balk at the law intervening to protect anonymous sources in the papers, or Government enquiries being kept secret, or criminals in ongoing trials being referred to only by pseudonym.

The flow of information that the internet has provided is not one way. If we want information to be free, we have to accept that these are the real consequences – and if we want to know all about the people who work inside our public services, we’re going to have to accept that others can and will discover and reveal their identities.

And therein, I think, we find the reason for the aforementioned correlation between a known identity and readership. You simply cannot attain so high a readership under a pseudonym without people being interested in, and discovering, your identity.

Freedom isn’t just the freedom to do whatever you want. It’s also the acceptance that others are allowed to do whatever they want. The Times may have acted shamefully, and out of spite and hypocrisy, but the alternative is for the law to decide, arbitrarily, who has freedom of speech and who does not.

Would that really be in the public interest?

1. Old Holborn, Harry’s Place and Mr Eugenides, for the record [↩]
2. Isn’t that the bit that just makes you want to scream? [↩]
3. I must also doff my cap to the ever-excellent Behind Blue Eyes, whose post on this is similarly spot on. [↩]
4. No link. [↩]

I know I’ve been a bit light on the blogging front recently – to make up for it, here’s a few pointers for surviving the inevitable Zombie attack. Click the picture for a bigger version.

The Prime Minister’s office refused to comment on rumours that this leaflet has in fact been prepared by the NHS for immediate distribution in the event of an outbreak of the Rage virus.

Image Source, via @rands

Tom Harris is that most unusual of things: a Labour MP who I have a lot of respect for as a thoroughly decent chap – and a writer and blogger of the highest calibre. Yesterday, he stood up to Gordon Brown and asked him to resign, and he put what he had said up on his blog.

Unfortunately, to my mind, his first sentence said one thing which spoke louder than any of the rest of his letter could. It was this:

If there’s one thing that unites this PLP it’s a determination to win the next election.

Doesn’t that just sum up the problem with New Labour? That the only thing that brings them together is the determination to win, and retain, power. That the only thing that’s tearing them apart is the prospect of losing power.

It is also remarkably similar to what that odious twerp Sion Simon said which wound me up no end at the time, too.

It’s almost as if they haven’t noticed that inequality has risen under their watch; that education standards are falling; that social mobility has fallen; that debt, both personal and national, has risen out of control; that crime is rising; that unemployment is rising. One wonders, if the Labour Party weren’t on the path to lose a General Election, whether they would have even noticed these things. Apparently, though, they can’t be brought together by the thought of making the country a better place to live in – they can only be brought together by a thirst for continued power, seemingly for its own sake.

And this is the problem with the Labour rebels. This is why I compared them to the Judean People’s Front. They’re rebels without a cause – they seem to have no idea what they do want – they just know they don’t want to lose the next election.

I’m sorry, Tom, but even in calling for Gordon Brown to resign you’ve exposed the fact that you’re part of a governing party that has not only outstayed its welcome, but lost its way as well. I hope a few years in opposition will help the Labour party find its way again – and if not, that the Liberals can hold Labour to account for what they have done and overtake them four years later. I hope there’s somebody left with the strength to oppose David Cameron’s Conservatives more effectively than the Tories opposed Tony Blair.

I hope for that, but somehow I just don’t expect it.

Well, that was a disaster. Britain are now not sending one, but two representatives of the ‘Bastard Nazi Party’ to the European Parliament. Because I know the mood is going to be a little grim, I thought I’d share 5 reasons that perhaps this isn’t so much of an unmitigated disaster as it might look. Some silver linings in the clouds. So, here they are:

1. It’s Only Europe

Individual MEPs actually have very very little power over, well, anything. The problem with having a BNP candidate is not the introduction of fascism into Europe (and we’re far from the only country to have a nationalist and socialist party appearing in Brussels); it’s the national embarrassment and the loss of the moral high ground that really stings.

We now have five years coming in which Britain is partially represented by racists and fascists, but at least they won’t be any more effective pushing their politics on us than any of the other MEPs have been. It may be a first step towards Westminster, but it’s a baby step at most, and they won’t make it much further.

2. ‘No Platform’ is Over

The disingenuous idea that we should simply ignore the BNP and refuse to give them a platform is, by necessity, gone. I’ve always disagreed with ‘no platform’, as it simply prevents those who might be convinced by the BNP from ever hearing the counter-arguments against them. They’ll also have…

3. Exactly Enough Rope to Hang Themselves

More publicity for that swivel eyed mad man who leads the BNP is not going to be a good thing for them. The more the BNP appear on the radio and the TV, the more they’ll be exposed as the… erm… unlovely people that they are. I’ve always had a problem with the ‘intellectual hand-wringing’ approach many use toward the BNP. Hopefully we’ll see an end to this and an actual robust challenge made to their politics. This can only be a good thing.

4. The BNP’s Vote Actually Went Down This Year

In comparison with the last European election, it may surprise you to learn that the amount of votes cast for the BNP actually went downwards, after the highest publicity and most costly campaign they’ve ever run.

Voters are not the same thing as party members, and many of them have their own reasons for voting BNP, such as ‘sending a message’. Only a miniscule amount of people agree with the BNPs politics, and it seems that number is actually declining. Which means…

5. This Is Labour’s Failure

Labour have been given such a kicking that it’s hard to believe. In many parts of the nation, Labour has come fifth. In Cornwall, they came sixth – behind the Cornish Nationalists!

The truth is, the BNP’s so-called ‘rise’ is actually the utter failure of Labour. Disenfranchised Labour supporters have been placed in a position where their chosen party is utterly unelectable, but the main opposition – either the Tories or Lib Dems – don’t represent them. They’re left with a choice between staying home or voting BNP.

The reason it being Labour’s failure is important is because Labour aren’t going to win the next election. This form of errant populist socialism tends to take the path of least resistance, and when there’s a Tory government to oppose, Labour will see its support rise while the BNP watch their vote share plummet.

Old habits die hard, so I wanted to share a few of the interesting things wot I’ve spotted about the internet over the last week or so. Unfortunately, I haven’t been continually saving them up, so it’ll only be the ones I can actually remember, and it’ll be unfairly weighted towards the last three days rather than the last week. Oh well.

- – -

A quick technology one, before the politics stuff: the Time Magazine cover article this week was absolutely the best thing that’s ever been written about Twitter. Seriously. Well worth reading, even if you don’t get or don’t use Twitter – if you just want to understand what it is that people use Twitter for, and why it’s a big deal.

- – -

Mark Thompson proposed a little wager on the question of whether or not Brown would be able to stay in office beyond the end of June. As you may have noticed, I don’t think he’s got much chance of winning that bet – and even if Brown does go it’ll only be because Labour care more about presentation than they do about politics. But time will tell.

- – -

Blue Eyes documented the death of our democracy yesterday, and is well worth quoting:

However you define “democracy” it is clear that Britain is no longer a democratic country. A leader who was not elected now leads a cabinet of appointees undertaking polices which the people do not support. Specific manifesto promises have been smashed, proposed reforms make the last election seem a very long time ago. That the Prime Minister is left only with disgraced figures such as Mandelson, Darling and Hain and odd-ball outsiders such as Glenys Kinnock shows how few people of talent there are on the red side of the green benches of our elected chamber.

This collapse in our democracy is unprecedented since the turn of last century. It’s a disgrace.

- – -

Alix Mortimer thinks there might be more to Caroline Flint’s accusation the Brown treated her as ‘window-dressing’ than meets the eye. I can’t see how she could be right – surely even Gordon Brown isn’t that low – but her theory fits so well to events that it’s hard not to consider it…

- – -

Charlotte Gore set out the highly democratic process Labour would have to go through to get rid of Brown. Try reading with a thick Russian accent. It’s fun.

- – -

Last but certainly not least is Rachel Sylvester in The Times on Friday:

This is a Shakespearean tragedy, rather than a Greek one, because the hero will be brought down by a fatal character flaw and not by fate. Labour MPs love to debate which tragic hero Mr Brown is most like. Some say he has Hamlet’s tendency to dither – agonising whether “to be or not to be” in favour of public service reform. To others it is Macbeth’s “vaulting ambition which o’er-leaps itself” that will bring him down. For years he was consumed by Othello’s “green-eyed monster”, a destructive jealousy of Mr Blair. This week he more resembles King Lear, driven to distraction by the perceived ingratitude of his daughters who rages on the heath that he is “more sinned against than sinning”.

Just marvellous.

Open Thread, guys, come say hello!

Some starters for ten…

• I went to see Jimmy Carr on Friday, He Was Awesome.
• I’ve just insulted my daughter’s singing on Twitter and am feeling a little guilty about it now.
• My next iPhone application is a game for toddlers about matching shapes up to each other. It’s all made and it works, but the look of the thing is way too spartan at the moment. I’d be interested in suggestions for improvements.
• Sharpe’s Opinion jumped up yet another 91 places in this month’s Wikio rankings, becoming the 222nd most influential blog in the UK. I’ve also been added to the politics category and am straight in at number 118, just a shade from being in the top 100. I expect this to recede next month, though, particularly since I’m not link-blogging at the moment.

• The thunder outside today is highly exciting for little Kayleigh.

…Or whatever else you fancy saying. Mi casa es su casa. Only rule: no politics.

P.S. I’ve seen other bloggers do open threads, but always been terrified that nobody might say anything. I hope this doesn’t happen…

I think it’s fair to say that some people are not expecting Gordon Brown to last out the weekend as Prime Minister. Others are clearly not expecting him to last out the month of June.

What isn’t clear, however, is exactly who they think would replace him – and more crucially, why.

Alan Johnson has been talked about as a candidate, as has Ed Miliband, and indeed Harriet Harman. When espousing their virtues, though, rarely mentioned are the ideas or policies they might bring in that would be better than what is already being offered by Gordon Brown. Nobody seems to ask how Johnson would have approached the recession; how Miliband would have tackled expenses-gate; how Harman might deal with the collapsing car industry.

This is largely the point that Hopi Sen made when defending Gordon Brown last month. The Labour rebels are utterly without a cause. This isn’t the Rebel Alliance, it’s the Judean People’s Front. They think, in short, that presentation is the problem, not policy. They think Brown is unpopular because he doesn’t communicate well enough, not because the things he communicates are unpopular.

On the whole, Gordon Brown’s policies have actually been fairly popular with the Labour Party. They welcomed the VAT cut, they applauded the new 50p tax band for high earners, they were delighted with the nationalisation of the banks and are cheering on the idea of part nationalisation of the car industry¹. They now want the face at the top to change, but the underlying policies to stay much the same.

It’s remarkably easy to revel in schadenfreude over that point. Remember, after all, that Tony Blair was so undermined by his party because they claimed to be fed up with spin and media presentation overtaking political decisions. They fiercely attack David Cameron, largely for being a normal-seeming human being rather than the dysfunctional-in-public but supposedly intellectually heavyweight² Gordon Brown.

Now, I can’t speak for the electorate at large, and I have never conducted polling to find out whether specific policies would be popular amongst them – but I can make an educated guess that Labour’s return to the Socialism of the 70’s is not really going to successfully win over the hearts and minds of the people.

I can’t imagine, either, that Same Labour Party, Same Labour Policies, New Labour Leader is a campaign slogan that’s going to go down very well at the next General Election.

So New Labour have their hands tied. They can’t really get away with yet another drastic, fundamental change in policy within this term of Parliament, but changing leaders without changing their policy platform stinks of the same style over substance line that they trot out whenever David Cameron appears on the TV.

Raymond Chandler said, “the moment a man begins to talk about technique that’s proof that he is fresh out of ideas.” I think the would-be rebels would do well to consider that, before they base entire leadership campaigns on technique, and forget entirely about getting the ideas right.

1. Because British Leyland was so successful, you see. [↩]
2. Yet to see the evidence… [↩]

I’m off to see Jimmy Carr at Derby Assembly Rooms, so I won’t be blogging or tweeting or anything until tomorrow at the earliest now.

In the meantime, I just wanted to say how much fun today has been. Caroline Flint’s sudden resignation in the middle of Brown’s Press Conference was one of those moments that will live in my memory for a while. Margaret Beckett leaving the Government is a wonderful wonderful thing (she’s my MP), and

This rather pathetic uprising, from the farcical hotmail inbox to the uncoordinated resignations, has left me in mind of one thing, and one thing only. Here they are: the Judean People’s Front. Enjoy.

You Silly Sods.

News hit last night that Work & Pensions Secretary James Purnell had resigned from the Cabinet and called on Gordon Brown to stand down.

And when I say news hit, I mean that Christmas was cancelled. At the end of a day of local and European elections, news reports which would normally chock-a-block filled with election speculation, exit polls and other mind-numbingly dull reports which I wouldn’t watch if you held a gun to my head, instead I was watching Iain Dale, ‘dressed for radio’¹ on News 24 talking about how this time Brown’s really finished, how his position is now untenable.

The Tories are having a field day, too – they’ve been waiting for this day, the one where they can arrive on the TV and twist the knife round as far as it will go.

Hang on a minute, though.

His position is untenable. Where have I heard that phrase before? Oh, yes, it was exactly what was said about Jacqui Smith back two months ago when we found out her husband had been watching porn films on her expense account. It’s exactly what was said about Hazel Blears, and James Purnell, in the wake of the expenses scandal.

All three of these ministers, in other words, have gone from untenable positions right the way through to important resignations in but a few short months. All three of them would have made it back into Brown’s cabinet after a reshuffle. All of them jumped, without any serious expectation of being pushed.

The Labour Party don’t understand what an untenable position means. Gordon Brown wouldn’t know an untenable position if it stole his women and raped his cattle². Gordon Brown’s position may be untenable, but thanks to the minutiae of Labour Party rules, there’s very little chance of a revolt actually being able to remove him unwillingly. Unlike with Thatcher and the Conservatives, Labour can’t simply trigger a leadership election against a sitting Prime Minister without fundamentally changing their own rules. The only way he’s going to leave the post of Prime Minister is if he accepts that somebody else would do a better job. We’re talking about Gordon Brown here. Do you really think that’s gong to happen?

Don’t get me wrong, if Gordon Brown resigns, that there will be worth a bottle of my rather delicious wedding day Champagne. I’ll happily dance a salsa on his political grave³. It would be a day I’d remember for many a happy year, make no mistake. But that Champagne isn’t on ice just yet.

Brown’s position is untenable? I’ll believe that when I see it.

1. Incidentally, a description that, if I were the sort to have illusions of grandeur, I’d take credit for coining… [↩]
2. Or something [↩]
3. Mental note to self: book salsa classes. [↩]

If there’s one overriding theme to this year’s Euro Elections, it’s anyone but the BNP. Apart from not really understanding why they’re so scary in the first place, I’ve also increasingly been worrying about what that says about us, as voters.

You see, we live in a democracy, and in a democracy we accept that the area we live in will be represented by the person who receives the most votes from our neighbours. If we disagree with our neighbours decisions, we have three options: move away from that area to one where we feel our neighbours broadly agree with us; continue living there but accept that our specific view is underrepresented in that area; or, attempt to convince as many of our neighbours as possible that they are making a poor decision and they should actually vote for somebody else.

It’s that third one that seems to cause the most problems. It’s also that third one which gets the libertarian contingent so upset. The fact that the third option exists is what makes democracy great – if you disagree with your neighbours, you are free to try and convince them that they are wrong – but you must also be able to accept the possibility that they might not be convinced, or they might simply not care.

And so we come to the BNP. The thing is, if they represent widely held beliefs in your area, they just may win seats. Even worse, if they do represent the views of people in your area, they actually deserve to win seats. That is how democracy works.

Saying otherwise, in fact, would be undermining the very concept under which this country is governed. Put simply, if the BNP shouldn’t be allowed to win seats, then neither should any other party.

The entire ‘get out the vote to stop the BNP’ argument is utterly vacuous. Not only does it undermine the very concept of democracy, it’s a pure and simple negative campaign. What we should, instead, be doing, is trying to understand what makes people vote for the BNP – what it is that makes people feel that a racist, protectionist, totalitarian party represents them. In some cases it may, obviously, be because they’re racist and xenophobic, but in most cases I imagine it’s because they simply have nowhere else to turn. The solution to the problem of the BNP is not simply to claim that it’s self-evident that ‘the BNP are twats’, but to help provide a real alternative for the disillusioned folk who simply cannot see who else to vote for.

So, before you go out and vote for anyone but the BNP, remember that if you vote against a party, really you’re voting against democracy itself. Vote for the party that comes closest to representing your views, not the one that sends a message¹, not the one that has the most chance of keeping another party out. Vote, always, for the party you agree with the most – if there’s no party, consider independents.

And if everybody does that and it means that the BNP win a seat, be grateful – because it’s far better than the alternative: that we don’t live in a democratic society at all.

1. May I just mention here that I am very upset with David Cameron over this particular point. Receiving an email from him earlier on which said that the reason I should vote Conservative is because I want a General Election irritated me more than anything else he could possibly have said. For once, I find myself on the side of those who say he’s a slimy git, and I don’t like being on that side. Mr Cameron: Must. Try. Harder. [↩]