As you may remember, Tory pundit Iain Dale included me in his bizarrely-constructed top 100 left of centre bloggers. As I pointed out at the time, one of many problems with his obscure methodology was that he couldn’t seem to tell the difference between left-of-centre on the one hand and, on the other hand, affiliated with the Labour party.
In a bookshop today, I stumbled upon his Guide to political blogging 2007. Drunk on fame, I flicked through and saw that he’d listed me as the 88th best Labour Party blog. Now, at the time of compilation I wasn’t yet a member of any political party, but I’ve never ever supported, or even voted for, the Labour Party. For as long as I’ve been politically aware they’ve been a pack of slavering sold out spin merchants, only distinguishable from the hated Tories themselves by the sheer aggressiveness of their imperial policy and their continued financial support from the labour aristocracy. In spite of my respect for a few dissident MPs, I would never dream of affiliating to that party, and would be deeply insulted if it turns out that anyone takes Iain Dale seriously.
This kind of thing is, of course, central to the raison d’être of self-appointed experts like Mr. Dale. Just as politics in Westminster implodes to an even narrow spectrum of different spins on the same consensus, so does the internet come into its own as a place to discuss and debate more freely, more openly, more democratically and more radically. So it falls to the pundits of the elite to authoritatively sideline everything remotely interesting.
Of course, the aforementioned lazy methodology let a few blogs slip through from the actual left (including a few absolute gems in the low 80s, hehe), although the absence from the list – indeed, from the top slot – of Lenin’s Tomb alone makes the list useless as a guide to the wider blogging left too. It stands as a monument to the arrogance, irrelevance and self-absortion of the political class and their courtiers, and a timely reminder of Chomsky and Gramsci. In short: never trust an “expert”.
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