Quaequam Blog!

This is probably little more than pre-election nerves, but Michael Crick has been having fun with it:

The Conservative Party high command is so worried about some of David Cameron’s Parliamentary candidates that they’ve started holding meetings every two weeks to monitor what they call a “watch-list” of those “have the potential to embarrass the Party”.

The interesting thing about this is a) what does it say about CCHQ morale that the minutes got leaked in the first place and b) what do they mean by “potentially embarrassing”? Based purely on anecdote (and admittedly I am hardly unbiased), they do seem to have more “embarrassments” than the other parties. Every other month a Tory candidate seems to resign for making a homophobic, racist or sexist remark - and let’s not even get into the MPs. Since CCHQ almost certainly know more about their own candidates than I do, the fact that they appear so concerned means we might have an entertaining 2009.

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I’ve spent days resisting blogging this wish because, quite frankly, I don’t think it will happen. But it certainly is a dearest wish, so it makes the cut.

What I mean by “money for nothing” is the tendency of the late 20th and early 21st century to look at everything as if it were capital to be exploited, and yet at the same time to think that capital doesn’t behave like capital any more. When the classical economists wrote about capital, they were, in the main talking about widgets - things you build. They can make you a lot of money but they always break, rust or wear out in the end, and then you have to buy new widgets. Stocks and shares were part ownership of big widgets, and ultimately behaved by the same laws.

(As an aside, my reading of Locke’s definition of “property” is that it informed and is essentially the same as the classical economist notion of “capital” - it is one of the reasons I despair about this modern vogue for rightwing libertarianism in which people invoke Locke only to insist that when he talked about “property” he was referring to everything you might happen to “own” even though it contradicts his whole argument about rights to “property” coming about due to self ownership.)

We’ve been moving away from that model for 200 years, but in the last two decades it accelerated. Everything, from homes to public services to loans, became capitalised. Intellectual property, at the same time, has become less like capital as the limitations of copyright get extended and patents become renewable (I ended 2007 by declaring the 21st century to be dominated by IP Wars - we ended 2008 with the government capitulating and agreeing to extend recording copyright). Speculation, speculation on speculation and even speculation on speculation on speculation has become a central part of our finance system. All talk about “value” - financial value never mind ethical or social value - has become lost.

I’m not convinced that much will happen to change. The Lib Dems’ Green New Deal is very welcome indeed, but we don’t appear to be saying very much to ensure that the economy changes course - we aren’t arguing for much more than a greener, kinder version of the status quo. Brown just seems to be firing off in entirely random directions and even though I’m not convinced that piling up the national debt is the big problem the Tories keep claiming it is, my mind does boggle how he can keep coming up with more and more spending commitments with no idea how he intends to pay for it all. As for the Tories themselves, well, they appear to have looked at Japan in the nineties and said to themselves “we’ll have some of that!” Having got us into this mess, dragging the rest of the political class in the mire with them, their new approach seems to simply be to wallow.

Like I say, I don’t expect this wish to be fulfilled. Yet strangely, almost every day I seem to hear a new person expressing it. Are we looking at a longer term shift in attitudes? Either way, we won’t know for sure by the end of 2009.

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Sue Blackmore reports on a pledge which I hadn’t heard of but certainly will comply with, undertaking to write to the BBC and request that they allow atheists, humanists and “brights” (sorry, cannot bring myself to use that term unironically) to speak on Thought for the Day.

The difference between Blackmore’s sensible approach, and the rather more incendiary wording of the pledge itself, is what I’m getting at when I express my wariness about “new” atheism. I’m all for forthright views, but not angry ones. The Atheist Bus Campaign is great because, fundamentally, it is a lighthearted response to something quite genuinely offensive. Blackmore’s emphasis is not on banning Thought for the Day but expanding it - and in the process appraising what it is there to do.

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So claims Peter Oborne, something which appears to have got the Tories into a right tizzy. Stephen Tall at Lib Dem Voice has debunked most of it so I will try to avoid repeating what he has said. It should also be pointed out that Clegg in particular has been linked to rumours (also by rightwing commentators) of planning a coalition with Cameron at various stages over the past couple of years. The idea that Vince Cable has suddenly become Gordon Brown’s “poodle” because, um, Gordon Brown has finally started agreeing with Vince is ridiculous - is he really supposed to start disagreeing with his own policies once Labour adopts them? Lead by Cable and Clegg, the Lib Dems have recently worked with the Tories to force a vote on the VAT cut - a fact conveniently not mentioned by Oborne.

The Lib Dems’ opponents like to think the party is just itching to jump into bed with whichever party pulls back its duvet. The reality is somewhat more complicated. The party embarked into a near civil war at the end of the nineties when two distinct schools of thought emerged: one that the party should strengthen its ties with Labour and eventually merge (the Ashdown option) and one that the party needed to regain its independence and walk out of the Joint Cabinet Committee it sat on to oversee the constitutional reform agenda (a joint agenda post-1997 following the Cook-Maclennan Agreement). The latter school won. Yet at almost the same time we were in government with Labour in Scotland and about to enter a partnership government in Wales. Fast forward to 2007, and the Lib Dems walked away from coalition in both Scotland and Wales, the latter subtly (and sometimes not-so subtly) framing the recent leadership election between Kirsty Williams and Jenny Randerson.

For a third party, coalition is an opportunity to get your hands on real power, but it is also liable to blow up in your face. Look at what’s happened to the FDP in Germany (more controversially perhaps, I would argue it has happened to the Scottish Lib Dems, going by the opinion polls, the fact that they are on their third leader in three years and personal anecdote - it remains to be seen if Tavish Scott will get them back on track). And in recent history, every time we’ve had to seriously consider coalition, we have been well aware of this fact. That’s part of the reason why it is the one issue liable to split the party down the middle; as a party which tends to resolve its policy disputes by debate and voting, we can pretty much weather anything else.

So when Oborne starts doing his 2+2=5 calculations, you have to factor that in. You have to consider it in relation to the late nineties - a far more fertile period of Lib-Lab cooperation - which failed to result in coalition. Nonetheless, with the Tories the strongest they have been in fifteen years and the clear realisation that their current economic policies (such as they are) would be ruinous to the country, you can see why there is at least a temptation to think about formalising the two parties’ relationship once again.

The clearest stumbling block to a coalition however is Labour’s continual attack on civil liberties. The Lib Dems would lose their reputation as civil libertarians for all time if they entered a coalition with the party of identity cards and the database state. Unless Labour were to recant all these policies (which a number of its own backbenchers would have a thing or two to say about it - they aren’t all called Bob Marshall-Andrews you know), Clegg would have to be suicidal to contemplate it: a new, authentically liberal party - with at least a dozen MPs - would have formed before the ink on the agreement had even dried. As readers may have noticed, I have a tendency to be a bit down on Clegg so you might think I’d want a reassurance that this won’t happen - but it is so far in the realm of fantasy that I think I’d make myself look silly even demanding it.

The bottom line is, we no longer live in a political age where a few people in a Commons tea room can decide to enter a coalition. It is an area that any party leader treads very carefully in. Even if we found ourselves in a no-overall control situation after the general election, I don’t see the Lib Dems agreeing to anything more than providing confidence-and-supply to the party which won the plurality (this was bizarrely dismissed by Clegg in 2008 back when it was cooperation with Cameron that was the rightwing press’ “dead cert”, but then he does a lot of bizarre things - it was Kennedy’s stated policy in 2005).

One thing I will confidently predict is that in 2009 we will have at least one major “revelation” that, in fact, Clegg is in secret talks about a coalition with Cameron. Until Clegg makes his equivalent of the Chard Speech, I won’t be putting much faith into either spin.

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This can’t be a nine wishes for 2009 because he won’t actually be appearing in the role until 2010, but I am intrigued by the casting of Matt Smith for the 11th Doctor Who.

It appears to have upset a great many people and in this X-Factor age everyone seems to think they should have been consulted (imagine if they’d gone down the talent show route… Brrr!). What is most striking is that most of the objections appear to be based on what Smith is - i.e. young, white and male - rather than based on any informed view about his acting talent.

I have sympathies for those disappointed that it wasn’t Patterson Joseph as he is a great actor. And, superficially, I will admit to having a yearning to see someone in their 50s or 60s in the role (if you may recall that I was flying the flag for Simon Russell Beale). But the argument that ‘this time’ it should have been a black actor or a woman is tokenism pure and simple. They were casting an actor, not a face.

I only recall seeing Matt Smith in The Ruby and The Smoke (and its sequel) but he seemed like a good actor. The fact that he has plenty of stage experience is also a plus for me.

I do hope they put a lot of thought into how the character might develop. What I would be most disappointed to see is Smith emerging as a carbon copy of the Tennant Doctor. The whole cocky, god-like, ‘no second chances’ schtick has well and truly run its course. I’m hoping he’ll go for more of a nervy, Davison-meets-Troughton personality and be deliberately more fallible.

The other thing that I’m hoping they will avoid is having all his companions fall in love with him. Russell T. Davies’ tenure was marked by heightening the emotions in the show. Nothing wrong with that. But in so doing, he did occasionally teeter towards cliche. It had reached such a point by Tennant’s third season that they had to explicitly rule out the possibility of Catherine Tate’s character having a romantic relationship with him.

Sex is a poor substitute for emotional depth. If the last few years of Doctor Who haven’t taught the new producers that, then the direness of the first season of Torchwood and the triumph of Sarah Jane Adventures should have done by now. If there is a danger of having such a young Doctor it is that trying the same sort of thing they did with Rose and Martha would come across like a badly sung and danced copy of High School Musical.

But I’m optimistic they won’t make this mistake. I have a lot of respect for Stephen Moffatt, both for his Doctor Who scripts and his earlier work.

As for the Tenth Doctor? It will be interesting to see how he goes and to what extent the four specials will be interlinked. And where does Prof. Song’s seemingly long marriage to him fit in?

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2008 was the year in which the gaff was well and truly blown on the government’s relentless drive to have every one of us “pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, briefed, debriefed and numbered.” Starting with the data leaks scandals at the end of 2007, we had a steady trickle of revelations about how the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act is being casually abused by local authorities. The year ended with the revelation (courtesy of David Howarth) that the injuries which the police used as a pretext for raiding the eco-protest camp outside Kingsnorth power station included insect bites and toothache. We had an open verdict at the Jean Charles de Menezes inquest and police raiding Parliament without even bothering to try obtaining a warrant. All of this adds up to a state that is running completely out of control.

Domestic terrorism - the original pretext for all those extra state and police powers - has drifted down the agenda. So have we seen a reversal of the encroachment of civil liberties? Not really. Jacqui Smith’s response to the growing realisation that her plans for a national identity card scheme was completely unrealistic has been to adopt a divide-and-rule approach, targeting immigrants and smelly students and extending the full implementation of the scheme to 2011/2012. The near defeat in the House of Commons of the proposals to extend pre-charge detention to 42 days was followed by a total defeat in the Lords and the abandonment of the project by the government (ditto the plans to hold politically inconvenient inquests in secret). But this happened almost hand-in-hand with the announcement of government plans to begin recording the details of every email, telephone call and website visit made in the UK.

And while the Tories have, in the main, become born-again civil libertarians in recent years, it is clear that their opposition is only skin deep. David Davis’ resignation, it appears, was rooted out of a desire to force Cameron to not abandon opposition to 42 days. In this respect, it appears to have been successful. But almost instantly afterwards, his successor announced plans to increase police powers. And let’s not forget that under the Tories, the police would be more politicised than ever, with police commissioners directly elected (I should point out at this point that the Lib Dems want directly elected members of police authorities but a) this is far less problematic than electing commissioners themselves and b) I don’t agree with them either!).

Like the environment, the problem with the creeping assault on civil liberties is not that politicians are acting against the wishes of the electorate, but in the face of broad indifference. Unlike the environment, I don’t think the problem is quite as intractable. Liberty’s recent ComRes poll suggests why. Support for the rights protected by the HRA are extremely high, yet the general public has not made the connection. Given the lack of public information on the subject (”only 13% remember ever seeing or receiving any information from the Government explaining the legislation” - I’m amazed it is that high; I work in the sector and have seen sod all from the government on the subject), that isn’t entirely surprising.

So what’s to be done? Fortunately, plans are already in place for a Convention for Modern Liberty, supported by the Guardian, Liberty, Amnesty, NO2ID, Unlock Democracy, Open Democracy and Liberal Conspiracy. My hope is that this will lead to a significant shift in attitude. For that to happen however, the Convention will have to be the spark of something big; not another organisation but an upswing in civil liberties-based activism around the country. In this respect, the London-based event by itself is less significant than the satellite local and regional events around the country.

We certainly need a debate, but following that we need people who will be willing to take a stand. It isn’t enough for people to say they support civil liberties, only for them to vote for an MP who is part of the problem at the next general election. For the Convention to have been worth the time and effort being put into it, it needs to lead to thousands upon thousands of letters being sent to MPs, local public meetings, lobbies and hustings.

I would urge all readers of this blog to:
1. Bookmark the Convention for Modern Liberty website and sign up to their news alerts.
2. Attend a Convention event, either the one in London, one of the regional and national events happening on the same day or a local event. If there is no event happening in your area, start organising one!
3. Join a pro-democracy and human rights organisation. Whichever tickles your fancy (although, obviously, joining Unlock Democracy helps pay my wages!) and get involved.
4. Join or set up a local group. It doesn’t have to be affiliated to anything, and it needn’t be anything more than you and a couple of your mates to start off with.
5. Write to your MP and ask them their starter for ten: “what do you think about the dillution of civil liberties over the past couple of decades and what do you intend to do about it in 2009.” And keep writing to them.
6. Go to the Taking Liberties exhibition at the British Library if you can, before it closes at the beginning of March.
7. Tell everyone you know to do the same.

And as for the Lib Dems, I would urge them to be pushy. Both Clegg and Huhne are speaking at the Convention event on 28 February; make sure they get a good reception by promoting the event via your various networks (including the party’s central email list). Include a civil liberties-related story in every Focus leaflet you publish this year. If there are events happening in your area, make sure you attend. If there aren’t, make sure your local party is sets one up. The party could achieve a lot by riding the coat-tails of this one, both in terms of forcing the other parties to take it more seriously and by recruiting sympathisers to the party. It has many of the benefits of the anti-war march in 2003 but without the risk of sharing a platform with people who are predominantly out in the far left fringe.

In short, this is an O-P-P-O-R-T-U-N-I-T-Y (like most campaign gifts, it tends to need to be spelt out) - seize it with both hands!

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2008 was a thoroughly bemusing year for me. I found very little to inspire me politically and I think this blog has suffered as a result. If I began the year with an excess of optimism, the opposite seems to be the case by the end of the year.

It was a year where the political class seemed to lurch from one crisis to the next, learning nothing in the process. The Derek Conway debacle has lead to, well, pretty much nothing. The Lisbon Treaty debacle lead to the Lib Dems engaging in stunt politics for almost entirely the wrong reasons. The London Mayoral Election brought personality politics in the UK to unprecedented levels. The government’s entire constitutional renewal programme stumbled around achieving almost nothing. “42 days” was defeated, only for both the government and their Tory opponents to announce plans for even greater surveillence. The economy fell apart while the main parties argued pointlessly about public borrowing and tax cuts, almost entirely missing the point. And there has been a palpable sense of green agenda retreating. In the latter two cases, at least, I can point to the Lib Dems as providing a meaningful alternative.

The ten “top” Quaequam Blog! posts in 2008* were, in date order:

• Beware Livingstone supporters claiming you have no choice (25 January) - in the end, Brian Paddick’s candidacy proved to be extremely disappointing and the Lib Dems were squeezed to an alltime low in London.
• Does Rowan Williams have any more idea of what he’s going on about than I do? (8 February) - a typical attempt by Rowan Williams to have his cake and eat it (in that respect, it mirrors his comments on disestablishment of the Church of England a few weeks ago)
• Logical fallacies and euroscepticism (13 February) - an attempt to intervene in the dull Lisbon Treaty debate via the medium of diagrams. The Lisbon debate was one of the most thoroughly bemusing aspects of 2008.
• 15 February 2003: five years (and 11 days) later (26 February) - my attempt to sum up my experience of the Great Anti-War Demonstration.
• Is Nick Harvey happy being the unacceptable face of Parliament? (21 March)
• Child porn, cartoons and unintended consequences (28 May) - this post had a huge number of readers, mostly the wrong kind who appeared to be looking for actual child porn. For similar reasons, my post from last year about Madeleine McCann also topped the poll.
• Tory calls to make maths “chic” badly miss the point (3 June)
• Clegg unveils super powers? (21 August)
• Dangerous Complacency over the Damian Green affair (30 November)
• Why the green movement fails (7 December)

Like many, I enter 2009 in a pretty pessimistic mood about the future. Here’s hoping it will confound my expectations at least as much as 2008 did!

* According to the most poll ratings, highest poll ratings, most readers and my personal favourites - all of which are equally problematic.

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Most of this article was written on Monday but I’ve only just got around to finishing it.

I enjoyed the Nine Carols and Lessons for Godless People enormously and 2009 will, by all accounts, be a bit of a party for atheists. Starting in January we have the Atheist Bus Campaign and then throughout the year people will be celebrating both the 200th anniversary of the birth of Charles Darwin and the 150th anniversary of the publication of On the Origin of Species. And yet, and yet…

If there was one thing that bugged me about the Carol Service, it was the level of reverence that Richard Dawkins was given by some of the performers, most notably Robin Ince. I suppose it would have been impolite to actually criticise the guy while he was waiting in the wings and the truth is he has provided a much needed corrective to the religious narrative over the past decade (and more). But he remains a deeply divisive figure, alienating almost as much as he engages. His call to arms and for agnostics to get off the fence leaves many ducking for cover.

The real problem atheists have is one of taxonomy. Atheism is just what is says on the tin - a lack of belief in God. To try and make it out to be anything more is frankly ludicrous and falls foul of the very naturalistic fallacy that people like Dawkins warn against. Secularism doesn’t help much either, although it still puzzles me why this has become such a swear word with the adherents of organised religion. That leaves rationalism - which is rather cold and too often veers towards positivism - and humanism - which is warm and fuzzy and often suspiciously so. Joining the British Humanist Association is on my to do list. My reason for not having done so already is rooted in me receiving an unsolicited copy of their newsletter a few years ago which had a bizarre article about a “humanist picnic” at which humanist families spent an afternoon bemoaning about how terrible religion is (I can think of more fun ways of passing the day, such as jabbing my eyes out with a rusty spoon) and urging me to buy humanist Christmas cards with all the crosses replaced with aitches.

I have been assured that they have come on a lot since then (although asking people to donate money so their Chief Executive can brand herself doesn’t exactly convince - can’t I donate money to prevent her from doing so?), but living caricatures of the humourless “militant atheist” are never that far from the surface. I adore New Humanist magazine for example, but the letters page is full of freaks. Then again, the letters pages of all publications are full of freaks - consisting as they do of blog trolls who lack the wherewithall to find the “on” switch of their PCs - but at least they aren’t always “our” freaks.

In this respect, finding a new voice for atheist comedy - which Robin Ince seems to have taken on as a personal mission - is a positive development. Laughing at ourselves is an absolute must for 2009 - something which, as I noted previously, is often sadly lacking.

One group we could do with hearing a little from is ex-Catholics. It has to be said that it doesn’t say much for a religion that creates so many of its most fervant critics. I mean, when the Pope says something stupid, I’m happy to join in the chorus of disapproval, but much of the anti-Catholic stuff out there borders on The Da Vinci Code in terms of paranoia (not that I’m obsessed with God Trumps, but the Catholicism one is a case in point). I’m always impressed at the way Catholics tend to choose the bits of their religion that they like and ignore the rest, as if it is some metaphysical branch of Woolies (RIP) - my favourites are the Catholics who are fine about having sex before marriage but think it is a sin to use a condom - but profound mass-hypocrisy does rather undermine the claims that it is simultaneously a vast conspiracy against mankind.

Fundamentally, we need a rational, reasonable voice out there to counter the rational, reasonable theist nonsense out there, of which Madeleine Bunting provides us with an excellent example today. Her claim that Darwin has been “hijacked” by atheists on the basis that he was probably agnostic is a crime of intellectual pygmyism, but one which many Guardian readers will have nodded sagely to today. But it is a ludicrous argument, similar to the sneering by Christian groups who thought it was hilarious that the Atheist Bus Campaign uses the less-than-forthright slogan “there’s probably no God” while ignoring the fact that the Alpha Course adverts which inspired it use the even less assertive slogan “if there was a God, what would you ask him?”

Yes, Darwin almost certainly sat on the fence when it came to the question of whether God existed or not, but to the extent that he believed in any God at all he was a deist. In other words, while he might have conceded the possibility of God, he was clear that there was no activist God playing a role in worldly affairs. Evolution is by definition a refutation of theism. Attempts have been made to square the circle - I spent many wasted hours researching panentheism for my undergraduate dissertation - but all of them reduce God to, at best, a “not dead yet” cameo role in the creation.

The new new atheism would be self-confident, not too concerned about what people think and far more concerned about how people act (yes, the two are related but no, the two are not causal). It wouldn’t tolerate the sort of argument advanced by Bunting above, but it would at the same time accept that a lack of religion by itself can never be a substitute for an ethical system. Ethical systems needn’t come from religion - indeed at some point I may find time to write about how the much-vaunted “golden rule” predates religion and is in many ways hindered by it. But ethics and morality are a) important and b) not informed by atheism per se. The answers are not easy, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t search for them.

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Partly, admittedly, because I set up a Google Alert of his name earlier this year during the Presidential election, Lembit Opik never stops getting in my face. His latest interview was in Wales On Sunday yesterday (odd since just a week ago Lembit was dismissing the same paper as “poor use of [his] time“). Regarding the presidential election, to the surprise of no-one, he is utterly unrepentent:

“I’ve been thinking about why the party establishment did not support me for the presidency. I put forward a new agenda, painting politics in primary colours, and perhaps they’re just not ready for it.

“I do politics in quite a distinctive way, and maybe they’re not comfortable with that kind of approach.

“I want us to be a party where we can express a strong corporate personality and strong individual personalities.

“Perhaps I frighten the horses, but the point is that, if you don’t, you’ll never create a political stampede.

“I do my best to reach out to the kind of people who don’t watch Question Time and Newsnight, and I think it would help politics if more politicians did so.”

But it wasn’t just the party establishment that didn’t support Lembit - it was 70+% of the party. Chris Huhne wasn’t supported by the establishment in either leadership contest he stood in, yet managed to leapfrog Simon Hughes in the first and came within 500 votes of winning the second. Are we all supposed to be mindless automatons?

What genuinely perplexes me about all this is that if Lembit could point to a single tangible fact which proved his hypothesis that appearing on Have I Got News For You was actually beneficial to the party, much of the criticism would be muted. The counter hypothesis is that a) most of the programmes he appears on either ignore politics altogether or advance an anti-politics agenda which Lembit himself does nothing to address and that b) while no-one can dispute the rise of Boris “LOL!!1!! LOOK AT HIS FUNNEE HAIR!!?!!” Johnson, Johnson never went within a million miles of half the paper-bag-opening-level programmes that are Lembit’s meat and drink and, frankly, when it comes to personality, Lembit is no Bozza. Have you ever seen a more polite, well-spoken individual on HIGNFY, Big Brother’s Little Brother or Celebrity Apprentice? The fundamental problem with Lembit’s celebrity appearances is that he doesn’t even make the most of them. In that respect, those who compare him to the Cyril Smiths and Clement Freuds of the past are missing the point.

But go on Lembit, prove me wrong in 2009. It is put up or shut up time. Because I can see how his grand master plan might work, I just don’t see it actually working.

If he is to do that however, he will have to embrace technology - something he has thus far managed to avoid in the way that 8 year old boys avoid baths. Oh, he bragged about his supporters on Facebook, many of whom appeared to be of the “LOL!!!1! LOOK AT HIS WONKEE CHIN!!!?!?!” variety, but that is a dead giveaway of someone who just doesn’t get technology. He doesn’t even have a website, or rather, he has *snigger* an ePolitix one, which is almost even worse. Even his Daily Sport column isn’t published online. So where do all these people who see Lembit on the television have to go? If they Google him, they’ll find a Wikipedia Page, a bland profile on the official party website, his defunct Presidential campaign website and a couple of videos. After that, it’s girls of a weathered and Cheeky variety all the way down. Lembit’s online “narrative” is written almost entirely by other people.

Iain Dale boasted 65,000 absolute unique visitors in November and 578,000 unique visitors in 2008. Given that only a fraction of Daily Sport readers will read Lembit’s column whereas almost all of Dale’s visitors are there because they want to be, those are figures that should give him pause for thought. If Lembit’s media appearances really do help him to reach out to people who would otherwise be unengaged, then he ought to be able to match and even beat Iain Dale’s readership in very little time at all.

It isn’t as if his target audience are somehow not online. Indeed, the people who Lembit claims to be reaching out to are over-represented on the web.

So what I’d really like to see in 2009 is a Lembit Opik blog to put us all in our places. If Lembit is right, then such a blog would climb to prominence quite quickly. What’s more, it would bridge the gap between the programmes he appears on and his politics. He’d win, his critics would be proven wrong but wouldn’t mind and the party would gain a major new asset. So how about it?

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Strange that the BBC fails to mention claims of vote-rigging in the poll to find the Greatest Russian. Could it be that they felt it would be a little rich coming from them?

If the BBC had run the poll, no doubt Stalin would have come third, only for them to come up with some convoluted excuse for why he managed to come first after all.

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