Political blogging in the UK

The Hansard Society - “an independent, non-partisan educational charity, which exists to promote effective parliamentary democracy”, to quote their words - has published a report on the use of weblogs in the UK political process, examining whether they can offer an alternative to the traditional channels of communication.

Their findings are not particularly blog-positive - based on the views of a ‘jury’ of non-bloggers who monitored the content of eight political blogs, one of their main conclusions was

“[our jury] found the tone of content unappealing”

although they did concede that

Blogging has the potential to be of enormous benefit to MPs and other elected representatives who use it as a listening post rather than another tool to broadcast their ideas, achievements or party dogma.

The obvious problem with this is that listening is not something that politicians are particularly adept at generally - witness the “Big (one-sided) Conversation” that was launched by the UK Labour party earlier this year (and has vanished into obscurity almost as soon as it arrived.) The natural instinct of the political machine seems to be one of absolute control over the medium and the message - while there are a number of UK MPs who run what could loosely be termed blogs, most are simply a series of slightly-modified press releases parroting the message of the day from the party’s media managers. Actual personal opinion is rather less common, and tends to be the preserve of local politicians, minor parties and eccentrics who have long given up hope of high office.

And central government is even seemingly even less interested in listening - when Stand.org.uk collected several thousand online signatures to a petition protesting the planned introduction of identity cards in the UK, the response of central government was first to ignore them completely, then to count the several thousand individuals as one single vote, and finally (and grudgingly) admit that there might be some opinion against the proposals. But the legislation was passed in any case.

The eight blogs that the study monitored don’t strike me as being particularly good examples of the real power of the medium - a better selection might have included Stand, or TheyWorkForYou, a fantastic database of information about the speaking and voting record of member of the UK parliament.

Perhaps the real value of weblogs in the political environment is airing the issues that the establishment would rather not air. Would we have known what was going on in Abu Grahib, for example, if it wasn’t for the fact that the news bounced around the blogosphere until the offline news outlets picked up the story?