Well we have to start somewhere...

After months of having a blank page on this website waiting for me to find a use for it and after many draft blog entries I have finally been spurred on into the modern age of political campaigning and by the most unlikely politician. I have just returned from a local Labour Party meeting where I heard a revelation that Tony Benn was hoping to start blogging in the near future. The idea of being beaten by Mr Benn was the final prod onto the national and international forum of debate that is political blogging that I very much needed.

But something that Tony Benn said inspired me far more. I have spent these months pondering ways to make my blogging space relevant, unique and attractive rather than simply my own little internet space for thinking, but one comment of his changed all this. He highlighted the absolute importance of party members grasping the opportunity to campaign on matters they truly and wholeheartedly believed in. For him this is the only way of achieving your aims and if you push the matter enough “first you will be seen as a radical, then they will call you mad, then they will consider you dangerous and finally it will be adopted and you won’t be able to find a soul that didn’t think it was a great idea in the first place”. Political history is littered with examples, universal suffrage, the NHS, minimum wage, environmental policy. But unfortunately politics has strayed from the idea of fighting for what you believe in to simply fighting the battles that will win you an election.

The legacy of the Thatcher and Blair governments is a society where the entrepreneur is valued more highly than the intellectual and the short term fixed is prioritised over long term progress. This attitude has filtered through society across the board and in particular amongst the British press who are happy to sacrifice healthy debate for a few cheap stories. Tony Blair left office cursing the beast he had helped create and blogging has become one of the few ways that the public can bypass the media monster. Through it we can engage in real debate about policy rather than personality and avoid the pages of speculation and scandal that can be so damaging to British politics (although unfortunately there have been occasions where our new “media class” in the political circle have attempted to taint blogging in the same way that the press has been tainted, “Red Rag” springs to mind).

This has been an important lesson for me to learn, that this blog does not need to be some pioneering project like LabourList and similar sites but instead just real politics. I must just hope that my opinions can become radical, mad and dangerous enough to help pull British politics out of the rut it currently finds itself in.